Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Andrija Medulić (Andrea Schiavone, Andrea Meldolla)
Croatian, Italian (Venetian); 16th-century
Split, Croatia: Museum of Fine Arts
60%
Orpheus. Mid 16th century. Oil on wood panel (attributed to Andrija Medulić)
At first I thought this was a clear fake. But I asked my Italian art guy and he told me that, while the attribution is probably fast-and-loose and not super reliable, the painting definitely looks 16th-century and Venetian, even if it may not necessarily be by "The Slav" himself ("Schiavone" was Andrija's nickname outside of Dalmatia). What tripped me up about this painting was the almost Romantic dark sketchiness, which makes it look like a cut-rate painter who'd seen more Delacroix than Veronese was trying to paint all Venetian without knowing how. But apparently Medulić cut his teeth alongside Tintoretto doing decorative panels for cassone (wedding chests), which panels were often pretty slapdash and generic. So what I thought was anachronistic subjectivism is actually just the quick, rough handling of a craftsman who was making wares to hawk. (Plus the panel needs cleaned, for sure.) All that said, there's something good going on here (if very limited in its aesthetic scope) that isn't totally reducible to the expressivity of Venetian brushwork. Look at the critters, lithic gargoyles against the black, and the way the scumbled paint struggles and fails to define their form; look at how Orpheus is a concretion of so many strokes that don't (as they would in a proper commission by Schiavone or any of the rest) quite congeal into an image. (TFS, 2025)