Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Benvenuto Tisio

TISIO, or Tisi, Benvenuto (1481–1559), commonly called Il Garofalo, a painter of the Ferrarese school. He was born in 1481 at Garofolo, in the Ferrarese territory, and constantly used the gillyflower (garofalo) as a symbol with which to sign his pictures. He took to drawing in childhood, and was put to study under Domenico Panetti (or Laneto), and afterwards at Cremona under his maternal uncle, Niccolo Soriani, a painter of credit, who died in 1499; he also frequented the school of Boccaccio Boccaccino. Removing to Rome, he stayed fifteen months with Giovanni Baldini, acquiring a solid style of draughts manship, and finally to Mantua, where he remained two years with Lorenzo Costa. He then entered the service of the marquis Francesco Gonzaga. Afterwards he went to Ferrara, and worked there four years, showing diligence and delicacy without much severity or elevation of style. Attracted by Raphael's fame, and invited by a Ferrarese gentleman, Geronimo Sagrato, he again removed to Rome, and found the great painter very amicable; here he stayed two years, rendering some assistance in the Vatican frescos. From Rome family affairs recalled him to Ferrara; there Duke Alphonso I. commissioned him to execute paintings, along with the Dossi, in the Villa di Belriguardo and in other palaces. Thus the style of Tisio partakes of the Lombard, the Roman, and the Venetian modes. He painted extensively in Ferrara, both in oil and in fresco, two of his principal works being the Massacre of the Innocents (1519), in the church of S. Francesco, and the Betrayal of Christ (1524), accounted his masterpiece. For the former he made clay models for study and a lay figure, and executed every thing from nature. Both in the Ferrarese territory and in Rome his pictures of small dimensions are very numerous. He continued constantly at work until in 1550 blindness overtook him, an affliction which he bore with patience, being a man of pleasant friendly disposition and of devout feeling. In the later years of his work he painted on all feast-days in monasteries for the love of God. He had married at the age of forty-eight and died at Ferrara on 6th (or 16th) September 1559, leaving two children.

Garofalo combined sacred inventions with some very familiar details. A certain archaism of style, along with a strong glow of colour, suffices to distinguish from the true method of Raphael even those pictures in which he most closely resembles the great master, and this is sometimes very closely. He was a friend of Giulio Romano, Giorgione, Titian, and Ariosto; in a picture of Paradise he painted this poet between St Catherine and St Sebastian. In youth he was fond of lute-playing and also of fencing. He ranks as the best of the Ferrarese painters; his leading pupil was Girolamo Carpi. The Adoration of the Magi, in the church of St George near Ferrara, and a Peter Martyr, in the Dominican church, Ferrara (sometimes assumed to have been done in rivalry of Titian), are among his principal works not already mentioned. The Palazzo Chigi and the Palazzo Borghese contain numerous examples, and the London National Gallery four, one of them being a Madonna and Christ enthroned, with St Francis and three other saints.