The online exhibition Amico reconsidered. Amico Aspertini and other Bolognese artists has been developed as part of the Euploos project, an interdisciplinary programme aimed at a critical review of the entire drawings collection of the Prints and Drawings Department of the Uffizi.

Recent analysis of the vast collection of the drawings historically attributed to Amico Aspertini (Bologna, 1473/75-1552) has permitted a philologically consistent reconstruction of the works of certain autograph, contributing to the illustration of certain aspects of his multi-faceted graphic research which was characterised by different artistic techniques. These ranged from the use of diluted inks, lead white and coloured pigments – to obtain pictorial effects that were destined to progressively splinter the forms – to the use of the pen, broad or fine and employed in a myriad of modes (from the line as pure outline to parallel shading and the vigorous crossed lines that partly resemble the woodcut approach).

A small selection of drawings by artists contemporary with Aspertini who were Bolognese by birth or adoption, such as  Biagio Pupini and Bartolomeo Ramenghi, known as Bagnacavallo, and by the two most prominent Bologna painters that had preceded him, Lorenzo Costa and Francesco Raibolini, known as Francia, and by the latter’s eldest son, Giacomo or Jacopo Raibolini are also examined. This offers us an overview of the context in which Aspertini trained and later worked, and hence an all-round understanding of his graphic production.

The common denominators of Amico’s art are his interest in the antique and his reflection on the various masters who were his contemporaries, including Michelangelo, Raphael and the Venetians. These predilections were then combined with the influences of German Nordic culture, which was known not only through the circulation of prints, and reinterpreted in the light of an ideal continuity of the artist with the most figurative and expressionist tradition of the fourteenth-century Bolognese school.