He is the artist who, together with the sculptor Guido Mazzoni, best embodies the potential of Modena at the end of the fifteenth century. The panel constitutes an important addition to the catalog of the painter, author of the famous' altarpiece of the three crosses' for San Francesco in Mirandola (now Galleria Estense), where he is aware of the novelties proposed by Ercole de 'Roberti, as well as of the taste archaeologist by Andrea Mantegna. Compared to that intense youthful test, this Saint Jerome testifies to a vision of a modern sign, where the landscape opens up to the sweetness of Venetian painting and the optical subtleties of the Flemish brand. On the road that leads to the beautiful altarpiece painted around 1506 for the Benedelli family in San Pietro, by now heralds the new and solemn classicism with which the painter redeems the tragic hardships of his early training.

It should be identified with a painting owned by Cardinal Alessandro d’Este and described as "a Portrait of Apollo with Marsyas by Guerzino di Cento" in the inventory of Roman assets passed to Princess Giulia d’Este upon his death (1624). The painter strips the mythological tale of any narrative delay and the composition, by virtue of the close cut, becomes a direct study of the characters, made more intense by the vibrant beating of light and the expressive use of shadows, which veil a moment of almost sensual disturbance of the young god, boldly challenged by the faun. The canvas belongs to the most fervent moment of the Cento painter's activity and is of particular importance not only for the reconstruction of the youth phase but also for that of Este collecting, where the role of Cardinal Alessandro is of great importance.

The reference to Christopher in this precious altarpiece, complete with the original frame, is based on the comparison with the inlays and with the large fresco with the Last Judgment in the cathedral of Modena. Massimo among the wooden masters in Emilia, is documented from 1449 to 1453 in relation to the decoration of Leonello d’Este's study in the Belfiore palace in Ferrara and all his subsequent activity testifies to his relationship with Piero della Francesca. Compared to the exasperated geometrization of the only pictorial work linked with certainty to its name, the Madonna of the column signed and dated 1482 (Modena, Galleria Estense), in this altar the clear forms of Tuscan perspective rationalism are imbued with a soft light that comes from from the bottom and expands into the gentle hilly landscape sliding on the faces of the characters identified in a naturalistic way.

Mentioned by Girolamo Baruffaldi among Lana's works in the Ducal Palace of Sassuolo, it is one of the highest achievements of the Ferrara painter who had long been involved in the Este court. An engraving by Lana himself taken from the painting (1643) is dedicated to Obizzo d’Este, brother of Francesco I and bishop of Modena. It is probable that Lana also made the San Sebastian for her patron, a theme particularly linked to the court, and that on the death of Obizzo the canvas was brought to Sassuolo. Lana is the protagonist of the Este artistic panorama of the first half of the century. Moving from a Ferrara formation (Scarsellino and Guercino), he gradually approaches the classicism of Guido Reni, to reach results of courtly elegance, as in this beautiful canvas where the sacred theme is played with a profane accent, in a very calibrated balance between alongside naturalism and cultured classical rhetoric.

The presence next to the Virgin of Scholastica, sister of St. Benedict, indicates that this delicate tablet, intended for private devotion, was made for a Benedictine nun. It is one of the most evocative works among those executed by the Ferrara painter around 1520 and dedicated to the theme of the Holy Family within the landscape. The classic definition of the forms and the elegant correspondence of the gestures reveal a now complete Raphaelesque experience but are softened by the juxtaposing and colloquial tone of the protagonists and the naturalism of the landscape that refers to Giorgione models in the grassy bank on the bottom. Alongside more prolific artists such as Dosso Dossi and Garofalo present in Ferrara in recent years, Ortolano's simple and direct painting bears a note of touching sincerity even when his language does not refuse a comparison with the most modern innovations proposals from contemporary culture.

A masterpiece of "ridiculous" genre painting in vogue at the end of the sixteenth century, the canvas is one of the most surprising highlights of Bartolomeo Passerotti's catalog, thanks to the skilful play between artifice and nature, between faithful portrayal of truth and its distortion caricatured with moralizing and sarcastic intent. In consonance with Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti's "Discourse on sacred and profane images" who appeared in Bologna in 1582, this genre of painting, low and trivial, can escape the indispensable "decorum" in high genre painting. If the allusion to the five senses is evident, symbolized by the gaze, the song, the scent of the rose, the hands touching the instrument, the dog biting the bread, the painting also contains a heavy irony towards senile eroticism; the old farmer with the flower on his hat is lost in his amorous serenade and does not notice that the dog is taking away his bread. This type of production by Passerotti, surprising for the degree of truth of everyday objects, dates back to the seventies, in contiguity with the works of Vincenzo Campi and in advance of Annibale Carracci's "Mangiafagioli", a real manifesto of modern realism.

Apex of the painter's mature production, the canvas returns a dramatic image of Calvary, in which the bodies of Christ and the robbers are illuminated by a strong light that pierces the stormy sky. The painting combines memories from Giulio Romano, with derivations from the Nordic world, evident above all in the brawl of the soldiers who dispute the robes of Christ at the foot of the cross, a scene taken from a famous engraving by Luca di Leyda. These pieces of brutal realism are counterpointed by others of refined elegance, such as the composed and very noble lamentation of the mourners on the left, juxtaposed with a frieze as in a classical bas-relief. The restless conduction of the brushstroke that lights up with flashes in the landscape on the background and juts out with plastic evidence the figures in the foreground reveals the now strongly anti-classical propensities that nourish the artist's language in mature years. It is clear that, after the attention paid to Raphael and Parmigianino, the Ferrara painter is looking for other models to refer to in order to express his strongly pathetic imagination and the anguished feeling of religiosity.

This beautiful canvas, almost certainly part of a series of Apostles, constitutes one of the most evocative and sincere proofs of the Reggio painter in the field of half-figure paintings intended for private collecting and can be compared with the San Giovanni Battista of the Civic Museum of Modena which similarly, he transfers a feeling of strong humanity to the sacred character. Alongside the mythological or biblical compositions set on the proscenium of a sumptuous baroque theater that achieved so much success among contemporaries, it is also works like these that reveal the deepest aspects of his production. His naturalistic inclinations came to him from the painters active in the Ghiara basilica in Reggio Emilia, fundamental for his training. In this phase of intense experimentation, the narrative accent of his painting, which has its roots in the powerful and jutting body of Tiarini and Bononi, is enriched by the knowledge of the Caravaggesque language, surprising by an Emilian painter for whom he is not documented a trip to Rome, but which explains, in this Sant'Andrea, the close cut if the party of light and shadow that crosses the bottom plane and vividly embosses the face of the saint.

Already referring to Garofalo, the small panel was returned by Carlo Volpe to his great pupil Girolamo da Carpi. In this painting, if the polite formal integrity and the refined elegance of the pose refer to that meditated cultural infusion of Raphaelesque matrix that characterizes the painter's production throughout his career, the cadences of more refined and subtle elegance that derive from Parmigianino, who survived in 1527 in Bologna from the Sack of Rome, and point towards a dating around the thirties. The most stringent comparisons are to be made with the frescoed tondi that Girolamo painted for the church of San Giorgio in Ferrara (1630) in collaboration with the ancient master Garofalo. The graceful figure of the saint is presented according to the iconography also disclosed by the famous Raphael altarpiece, but the archeological taste of the ruins at the bottom, restored in an almost romantic atmosphere, now reveal the influence of Giulio Romano.

Tiarini repeatedly illustrated the taxic tale of Rinaldo and Armida. In this painting, already in Cremona in the Vidoni collection, it depicts the moment when, after the victory of the Christian army, the sorceress tries to kill herself by piercing herself with an arrow, but is held back by the arrival of her beloved Rinaldo. Adherence to the poetic text is exemplary, even if the painter, with his bright and full-bodied language, transfers the melancholy sensuality of Tasso to a level of explicit erotic value. Compared to another version, which belonged to Cardinal Alessandro d'Este and now in the Lille museum, Tiarini loads the image in a more dramatic and baroque sense, in consonance with the passionate and engaging expressive rhetoric of the works created over the years thirty, when Tiarini is mainly active for Reggio Emilia.

Together with the four rectangular canvases of the Estense Gallery and the ovate of the collection of the Cassa di Risparmio di Mirandola, it was part of the rich decorative apparatus that adorned the ceiling of the Camerino dei libri di Cesare located on the ground floor of Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, for the which Venturini received the payment in 1593. The last undertaking sponsored by the Este family before the transfer to Modena, it constituted a moment of rapid cultural growth in the Ferrara art scene which involved emerging personalities such as Scarsellino and the young Carraccis. The casual elegance of the pictorial figure and the verve of neo-mannerist spirit manage to get the better of the abstruse complication of allegory, to be deciphered as an allusion to the virtues of the prince and the advantageous effects of good governance.

The images, recomposed in a diptych in recent times, were to decorate a tabernacle or a cupboard for sacred use. The elegant rendering of the figures, executed in monochrome, is accentuated thanks to the veins of the rosewood on which they are made and the rapid workmanship, rendered through very thin brushstrokes, determines an almost phosphorescent effect. Referred to Polidoro da Caravaggio when they were in the collection of the Marquis of Westminster in the Grosvenor House in London, they have been correctly returned to Bertoia with ample reasoning by D. De Grazia (1991) who referred them to the years in which the artist took part. to the decoration of the oratory of the Gonfalone in Rome (1569), frescoing the Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem. The elegant roundness of the gestures gives the characters, despite the small size, an extraordinary monumentality that refers to the figure of Christ in the Banner. If Bertoia, protagonist of the Farnese culture, stands out for the neo-Mannerist turn impressed on his painting in order to a well-understood revival of Parmigianineschi models, it is also evident that at these dates he must have long ago started those agreements with the Flemish painters, and in particularly with Bartolomeo Spranger, present in Parma and then in Rome from 1566 to 1575, who would have had such a part in his subsequent imagery.