Lazzaro Grimaldi

Lazzaro Grimaldi, son of a man recorded as Cupino, was born in Reggio Emilia on 15 April 1472. He first appears in the documentary record in 1493, identified in a notarial act as "Lazaro de Grimaldis dicto de Ardizone pictore," a painter active in Reggio Emilia. Further documents from 1494 and 1496 place him in the same city. By 1498 he was among the salaried artists of Duke Ercole I d'Este at the court in Ferrara, and in 1499 he is recorded working on the Ferrara cathedral alongside the painter Boccaccino Boccacci. He returned to Reggio Emilia and made his will there on 5 August 1504, after which the documentary trail on his activity ends.

His exact death date is not recorded. A notarial act dated 21 April 1520 refers to him as already deceased, and a commission for a previously assigned painting was reassigned to another painter, Orsi, by January 1516, suggesting he was no longer available by that point. The most defensible statement, following the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Treccani), is that he died sometime between his 1504 will and 1520, probably before 1516, with no more precise date or place of death documented.

His only securely attributed surviving work is the altarpiece "Annunciazione con s. Alberto," painted around 1504 for the church of Santa Maria del Carmine and now held by the Musee Conde in Chantilly. A "Ritratto di Alberto III Pio" (1512, National Gallery, London) was attributed to him by the critic Roberto Longhi in 1934, but current scholarship, following Adolfo Venturi, generally reassigns it to the painter Bernardino Loschi.

Readers should also note that this painter is a distinct historical figure from Lazzaro Grimaldi Ceba, the eighty-first Doge of the Republic of Genoa, who was born in Genoa in 1520 and died there on 16 February 1599. The two are unrelated beyond sharing the same personal and family names, and published references to "Lazzaro Grimaldi" should be checked carefully to confirm which figure is meant.

There is no contemporary critical commentary on Lazzaro Grimaldi in the art press; discussion of him exists almost entirely within specialist art-historical scholarship, principally the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani entry compiled from archival research. The one point of active scholarly debate concerns the 1512 portrait of Alberto III Pio in London's National Gallery, which Roberto Longhi assigned to Grimaldi in 1934 before later scholarship, following Adolfo Venturi, reassigned it to Bernardino Loschi. Beyond that single attribution dispute, there is no broader critical narrative about his style or standing.

Lazzaro Grimaldi does not have an established presence in the major auction-market price indices consulted for this profile; his name does not appear as a listed artist in either Artprice's or Artnet's standard artist databases. The one located reference to a sale under this name is a lot in Dorotheum's "Old Master Paintings" sale in Vienna on 28 April 2026, which realized EUR 117,000 against an estimate of EUR 100,000 to 150,000. Because that listing could not be cross-confirmed against a broader auction-market artist record, it should be treated as a single, unverified data point rather than as evidence of an active or liquid market for this artist's work.

This is not an artist with an active, verifiable secondary market. There is no catalogue raisonne, no current gallery or estate representation, and no confirmed exhibition history to draw on, and the documented oeuvre securely attributed to him consists of a single altarpiece in a French museum collection. The name is also easily confused with at least two other historical figures, the Genoese doge Lazzaro Grimaldi Ceba and the far better documented Baroque painter Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi (1606 to 1680), so any work offered under this name should be checked carefully against primary scholarship before any attribution, valuation, or purchase decision is made.