Biography

The Modenese painter Agnolo degli Erri (sometimes referred to as Angelo), Italian painter documented from 1442 to 1497, worked largely in the territory of the Este. Often collaborating with his younger brother, Bartolomeo, and Bartolomeo's son, Pellegrino, Agnolo decorated Estense residences in Modena, Sassuolo, and San Martino in Rio. In 1449 he made miniatures for the Oratorio dell'Ospedale in Modena; he also carried out minor and decorative works for the municipal government there.

Agnolo worked often on religious commissions. In 1463 he designed a pennant with an image of Saint Geminian for the cathedral in Modena. His only documented surviving picture is a polyptych with the Coronation of the Virgin, which includes side panels with saints and a predella with stories from the lives of the saints depicted above. The complex, painted for the confraternity of San Giovanni della Buona Morte, was originally in the Ospedale della Morte in Modena (now Galleria Estense). Agnolo received the first payment for this work in June 1462 and, although Bartolomeo received the final payment in 1466, the surviving panels seem to be by one hand and are usually - and plausibly - ascribed to Agnolo himself.

Artists as diverse as Jacopo Bellini, Cristoforo Lendinara, Domenico Veneziano, and Piero della Francesca have been cited as Agnolo's stylistic sources. Rooted in earlier artistic traditions, his style, which appealed to the relatively provincial tastes of Este-ruled Modena, is more prosaic, direct, and economical in narrative than the complicated mannerisms of his younger contemporaries Cosmè Tura, Francesco del Cossa, and Ercole de' Roberti, whose sophisticated styles flourished in the world of Ferrara itself.