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(in Italian) Venancio Belloni, Pittura genovese del Seicento. Dal Manierismo al Barocco, EMMEBI, Genoa, 1969. |
(in Italian) Ezia Gavazza, La grande decorazione a Genova, Sagep, Genoa, 1974. |
(in Italian) Raffaele Soprani, Le vite de pittori, scoltori, et architetti genovesi. E de' Forastieri, che in Genova operarono, Bottaro e Tiboldi, Genova, 1674, pp. 268–272. |
Giulio Pippi (c. 1499 – 1 November 1546), known as Giulio Romano and Jules Romain (US: JOOL-yoh rə-MAH-noh, Italian: [ˈdʒuːljo roˈmaːno]; French: Jules Romain), was an Italian Renaissance painter and architect. He was a pupil of Raphael, and his stylistic deviations from High Renaissance classicism help define the sixteenth-century style known as Mannerism. Giulio's drawings have long been treasured by collectors; contemporary prints of them engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi were a significant contribution to the spread of sixteenth-century Italian style throughout Europe. |
Biography |
Giulio Pippi was born in Rome and he began his career there as a young assistant to the leading painter and architect Raphael. He became an important member of Raphael's large team working on the frescos in the Raphael Rooms and Vatican loggias using designs by Raphael and, later painting a group of figures in the Fire in the Borgo fresco. He also collaborated on the decoration of the ceiling of the Villa Farnesina. Despite his relative youth, increasingly he became indispensable to the master and after the death of Raphael in 1520, he took a leading role in completing the Vatican commissions, designing the frescoes of the life of Constantine as well as completing Raphael's Coronation of the Virgin and the Transfiguration in the Vatican. In Rome, Giulio decorated the Villa Madama for Cardinal Giuliano de' Medici, afterward Clement VII. The crowded frescoes he designed lack the stately and serene simplicity of his master. |
On Raphael's death, Michelangelo attempted to take over completion of the commission for the Raphael Rooms at the Vatican, but along with Perino del Vaga, Giulio was able to keep it, as they had the drawings for much of the uncompleted work that was being executed under the supervision of Raphael. |
From 1522 he was courted by Federico Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, who wanted him as court artist, apparently especially attracted by his skill as an architect. The contemporaneous historian of the Renaissance, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), tells how Baldassare Castiglione was delegated by Gonzaga to procure Giulio to execute paintings as well as architectural and engineering projects for the duchy of Mantua. In late 1524, Giulio agreed to move to Mantua, where he remained for the rest of his life. In Mantua, rather than his given name, "Giulio Romano" was used to identify him by his geographical origin because he was not a native artist. Mantua is where he executed his most well-known work, hence that name became associated with him thereafter. His move to Mantua meant he escaped the disaster of the Sack of Rome in 1527, which hugely disrupted artistic patronage in Rome and dispersed the remainder of Raphael's workshop. |
His masterpiece of architecture and fresco painting in Mantua is the suburban Palazzo Te, with its famous illusionistic frescos (c. 1525–1535) and his use of the Palladian motif for arches used in the design. He also helped rebuild the ducal palace in Mantua, reconstructed the cathedral, and designed the nearby Church of San Benedetto. Giulio sculpted the figure of Christ that is positioned above Castiglione's tomb in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Curtatone, near Mantua. Sections of Mantua that had been flood-prone were refurbished under Giulio's direction and the duke's patronage and friendship never faltered. The studio he established in Mantua became a popular school of art. Giulio's annual income amounted to more than 1000 ducats. |
In Italian Renaissance tradition, many works by Giulio were only temporary. According to Vasari: |
When Charles V came to Mantua, Romano, by the duke's order, made many fine arches, scenes for comedies and other things, in which he had no peer, no one being like him for masquerades, and making curious costumes for jousts, feasts, tournaments, which excited great wonder in the emperor and in all present. For the city of Mantua at various times he designed temples, chapels, houses, gardens, facades, and was so fond of decorating them that, by his industry, he rendered dry, healthy and pleasant places previously miry, full of stagnant water, and almost uninhabitable. |
He traveled to France in the first half of the sixteenth century and brought concepts of the Italian style to the French court of Francis I. |
Giulio designed tapestries as well. It also is rumored that he contributed to a collection of drawings upon which a group entitled, I Modi, was engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi. All of those original drawings are said to have been destroyed because the content was no longer considered socially acceptable. |
Giulio Romano has the distinction of being the only Renaissance artist to be mentioned by William Shakespeare. In Act V, Scene II of The Winter's Tale, the statue of Queen Hermione that was described as coming to life during the play was identified by the bard as having been sculpted by "that rare Italian master, Julio Romano". |
He died in Mantua in 1546. According to Vasari, his best pupils were Giovanni dal Lione, Raffaellino dal Colle, Benedetto Pagni, Figurino da Faenza, Giovanni Battista Bertani and his brother Rinaldo, and Fermo Guisoni. |
Architecture |
On the whole, Giulio Romano was more influential as an architect than as a painter and his works had an enormous impact on Italian Mannerist architecture. He learned architecture the same way he learned painting, as an increasingly trusted assistant to Raphael, who was appointed the papal architect in 1514 and his early works are very much in Raphael's style. The project for the Villa Madama outside Rome, built by the future Medici Pope Clement VII was given to Giulio on Raphael's death. It already shows his taste for playful surprises within the style of Renaissance classical architecture. Planned on a huge scale, it was incomplete by the Sack of Rome, and never finished. |
The Villa Lante al Gianicolo (1520–21) was a smaller suburban villa in Rome, with a famous view over the city. Romano made the whole building suggest lightness and elegance to exploit the ridge-top position and to overcome the rather small Roman footprint. The orders are delicate, with Tuscan or Doric columns and pilasters in pairs on the main floor, and extremely shallow Ionic pilasters above, whose presence is mainly conveyed by a different colour. Alternate loggia openings are heightened by arches above the entablature. Romano's willingness to play with the conventions of the classical orders is already in evidence; the Doric here has guttae, but no triglyphs, on its narrow entablature. The volutes of the Ionic capitals are repeated in the window surrounds between them: "The canonic orders here begin to be treated visually as independent from their structural purposes, and this liberation offered the architect new expressive possibilities." |
His last building in Rome, the Palazzo Maccarani Stati (started 1522–23), was a considerable contrast, being a palazzo in the city centre, with shops on the ground floor, and a massive, imposing feel. The rustication and exaggerated size of keystones that were to be so prominent in his later buildings in Mantua, are already present on the ground floor, which dispenses with any classical order, but the two upper floors have increasingly shallow orders in pilasters, somewhat in the manner of the Villa Lante. |
His first building in Mantua has remained his most famous work in architecture. The Palazzo del Te was a pleasure palace outside the city that was begun around 1524 and completed a decade later. Here Giulio was able, because of the function of the building, to indulge to the full his playful inventiveness. |
Selected paintings and drawings |
Deesis with Saint Paul and Saint Catherine - Parma |
The Stoning of St. Stephen (Santo Stefano, Genoa): "Giulio never did a finer work than this," said Vasari. Domenico del Barbiere engraved the subject, so that it influenced designers who never saw the original in Genoa. |
Adoration of the Magi (Louvre) |
Fire in the Borgo, fresco (Raphael Rooms in Vatican City) |
Emblematic Figures, pen and brown ink and wash over graphite (Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco) |
Portrait of a Young Woman, after a design by Raphael, and later modified by Raphael (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg) |
The Battle of the Milvian Bridge |
The Triumph of Titus and Vespasian |
Portrait of Doña Isabel de Requesens y Enriquez de Cardona-Anglesola |
Madonna of the Cat (National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples, 1522–23) |
Noli me tangere, Prado Museum, Madrid |
Adoration of the Shepherds in collaboration with Giovanni Francesco Penni, Prado Museum, Madrid |
Gallery of paintings by Giulio Romano |
Notes |
References |
Bibliography |
Talvacchia, Bette, "Giulio Romano." Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press, accessed March 30, 2016, subscription required |
External links |
Media related to Giulio Romano at Wikimedia Commons |
Vita[1] by Giorgio Vasari, who describes his meeting with Giulio: |
"At this time Giorgio Vasari a great friend of Giulio, though they only knew each other by report and by letters, passed through Mantua on his way to Venice to see him and his works. On meeting, they recognised each other as though they had met a thousand times before. Giulio was so delighted that he spent four days in showing Vasari all his works, especially the plans of ancient buildings at Rome, Naples, Pozzuolo, Campagna, and all the other principal antiquities designed partly by him and partly by others. Then, opening a great cupboard, he showed him plans of all the buildings erected from his designs in Mantua, Rome and all Lombardy, so beautiful that I do not believe that more original, fanciful or convenient buildings exist." |
The engravings of Giorgio Ghisi, a full text exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains material on Giulio Romano (see index) |
Rossetti, William Michael (1911). "Giulio Romano" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). pp. 52–54. |
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, also spelled Arcimboldi (Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe artʃimˈbɔldo]; 5 April 1527 – 11 July 1593), was an Italian Renaissance painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books. |
These works form a distinct category from his other productions. He was a conventional court painter of portraits for three Holy Roman Emperors in Vienna and Prague; also producing religious subjects and, among other things, a series of coloured drawings of exotic animals in the imperial menagerie. He specialized in grotesque symbolical compositions of fruits, animals, landscapes, or various inanimate objects arranged into human forms. |
The still life portraits were clearly partly intended as curiosities to amuse the court, but critics have speculated as to how seriously they engaged with Renaissance Neo-Platonism or other intellectual currents of the day. |
Biography |
Giuseppe's father, Biagio Arcimboldo, was an artist of Milan, Italy. Like his father, Giuseppe Arcimboldo started his career as a designer for stained glass and frescoes at local cathedrals when he was 21 years old. |
In 1562, he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, Austria and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. Augustus, Elector of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his The Four Seasons which incorporates his own monarchic symbols. |
Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, plants, fruits, sea creatures and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today. |
At a distance, his portraits look like normal human portraits. However, individual objects in each portrait actually overlap together to make various human anatomical shapes. They were carefully constructed by his imagination. The assembled objects in each portrait were not random: each was related by characterization. In the portrait now represented by several copies called The Librarian, Arcimboldo used objects that signified the book culture at that time, such as the curtain that created individual study rooms in a library. The animal tails, which became the beard of the portrait, were used as dusters. By using everyday objects, the portraits were decoration and still-life paintings at the same time. His works showed not only nature and human beings, but also how closely they were related. |
After a portrait was released to the public, some scholars, who had a close relationship with the book culture at that time, argued that the portrait ridiculed their scholarship. In fact, Arcimboldo criticized rich people's misbehavior and showed others what happened at that time through his art. In The Librarian, although the painting might have appeared ridiculous, it also contained a criticism of wealthy people who collected books only to own them, rather than to read them. |
Art critics debate whether his paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind. A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times. |
Arcimboldo died in Milan, Italy where he had retired after leaving the Prague service. It was during this last phase of his career that he produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II (see above), as well as his self-portrait as the Four Seasons. His Italian contemporaries honored him with poetry and manuscripts celebrating his illustrious career. |
When the Swedish army invaded Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years' War, many of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from Rudolf II's collection. |
His works can be found in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Habsburg Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck; the Louvre in Paris; as well as in numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut; the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado; the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas; and the Candie Museum in Guernsey also hold Arcimboldo works. The Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid owns a painting of The Spring by Arcimboldo. |
He is known as a 16th-century Mannerist. A transitional period from 1520 to 1590, Mannerism adopted some artistic elements from the High Renaissance and influenced other elements in the Baroque period. A Mannerist tended to show close relationships between human and nature. Arcimboldo also tried to show his appreciation of nature through his portraits. In The Spring, the human portrait was composed of only various spring flowers and plants. From the hat to the neck, every part of the portrait, even the lips and nose, was composed of flowers, while the body was composed of plants. On the other hand, in The Winter, the human was composed mostly of roots of trees. Some leaves from evergreen trees and the branches of other trees became hair, while a straw mat became the costume of the human portrait. |
Legacy |
In 1976, the Spanish sculptor Miguel Berrocal created the original bronze sculpture interlocking in 20 elements titled Opus 144 ARCIMBOLDO BIG as a homage to the Italian painter. This work was followed by the limited-edition sculpture in 1000 copies titled Opus 167 OMAGGIO AD ARCIMBOLDO (HOMAGE TO ARCIMBOLDO) of 1976–1979 consisting of 30 interlocking elements. |
The works of Arcimboldo, especially his multiple images and visual puns, were rediscovered in the early 20th century by Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí. The exhibition entitled "The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the face from the 16th to the 20th Century” at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1987) includes numerous 'double meaning' paintings. Arcimboldo's influence can also be seen in the work of Shigeo Fukuda, István Orosz, Octavio Ocampo, Vic Muniz, and Sandro del Prete, as well as the films of Jan Švankmajer. |
Arcimboldo's works are used by some psychologists and neuroscientists to determine the presence of lesions in the hemispheres of the brain that recognize global and local images and objects. |
Art heritage, estimates |
Heritage |
Giuseppe Arcimboldo did not leave written certificates on himself or his artwork. After the deaths of Arcimboldo and his patron—the emperor Rudolph II—the heritage of the artist was quickly forgotten, and many of his works were lost. They were not mentioned in the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. Only in 1885 did the art critic K. Kasati publish the monograph "Giuseppe Arcimboldi, Milan Artist" in which the main attention was given to Arcimboldi's role as a portraitist. |
With the advent of surrealism its theorists paid attention to the formal work of Arcimboldo, and in the first half of the 20th century many articles were devoted to his heritage. Gustav René Hocke drew parallels between Arcimboldo, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst's works. A volume monograph of B. Geyger and the book by F. Legrand and F. Xu were published in 1954. |
Since 1978 T. DaCosta Kaufmann was engaged in Arcimboldo's heritage, and wrote of the artist defending his dissertation "Variations on an imperial subject". His volume work, published in 2009, summed up the attitude of modern art critics towards Arcimboldo. An article published in 1980 by Roland Barthes was devoted to Arcimboldo's works. |
Archimboldo's relation with surrealism was emphasized at landmark exhibitions in New York ("Fantastic art, dada, surrealism", 1937) and in Venice ("Arcimboldo's Effect: Evolution of the person in painting from the XVI century", Palazzo Grassi, 1987) where Arcimboldo's allegories were presented. The largest encyclopedic exhibition of Arcimboldo's heritage, where about 150 of his works were presented, including graphics, was held in Vienna in 2008. In spite of the fact that very few works of Arcimboldo are available in the art market, their auction cost is in the range of five to 10 million dollars. Experts note that it is very modest for an artist at such a level of popularity. |
Arcimboldo's art heritage is badly identified, especially as it concerns his early works and pictures in traditional style. In total about 20 of his pictures remain, but many more have been lost, according to mentions of his contemporaries and documents of the era. His cycles Four Elements and Seasons, which the artist repeated with little changes, are most known. Some of his paintings include The Librarian, The Jurist, The Cook, Cupbearer, and other pictures. Arcimboldo's works are stored in the state museums and private collections of Italy (including Uffizi Gallery), France (Louvre), Austria, the Czech Republic, Spain, Sweden, and in the US. |
Art interpretations |
The main object of modern art critics' interpretation are the "curious" paintings of Arcimboldo whose works, according to V. Krigeskort, "are absolutely unique". Attempts of interpretation begin with judgments of the cultural background and philosophy of the artist, however a consensus in this respect is not developed. B. Geyger, who for the first time raised these questions, relied mainly on judgments of contemporaries—Lomazzo, Comanini, and Morigia, who used the terms "scherzi, grilli, and capricci" (respectively, "jokes", "whims", "caprices"). Geyger's monograph is entitled: "Comic pictures of Giuseppe Arcimboldo". Geyger considered the works of the artist as inversion, when the ugliness seems beautiful, or, on the contrary, as the disgrace exceeding the beauty, entertaining the regal customer. A similar point of view was stated by Barthes, but he reduced works of the artist to the theory of language, believing that fundamentals of Arcimboldo's art philosophy is linguistic, because without creating new signs he confused them by mixing and combining elements that then played a role in the innovation of language. |
Arcimboldo speaks double language, at the same time obvious and obfuscatory; he creates "mumbling" and "gibberish", but these inventions remain quite rational. Generally, the only whim (bizarrerie) which isn't afforded by Arcimboldo – he doesn't create language absolutely unclear … his art not madly.Arcimboldo's classification as mannerist also belongs to the 20th century, for example in Gustav René Hocke's work The world as a Labyrinth, published in 1957. Arcimboldo was born in the late Renaissance, and his first works were done in a traditional Renaissance manner. In Hocke's opinion, during the Renaissance era the artist had to be first of all a talented handicraftsman who skillfully imitated nature, as the idea of fine art was based on its studying. Mannerism differed from the Renaissance art in attraction to "not naturalistic abstraction". It was a continuation of artistic innovation in the late Middle Ages—art embodying ideas. According to G. Hocke, in consciousness there is concetto—the concept of a picture or a picture of the concept, an intellectual prototype. Arcimboldo, making a start from concetti, painted metaphorical and fantastic pictures, extremely typical of manneristic art. In Umberto Eco's On Ugliness Arcimboldo is described as belonging to the manneristic tradition for which "...the preference for aspiration to strange, extravagant and shapeless over expressional fine" is peculiar. |
In the work Arcimboldo and archimboldesk, F. Legrand and F. Xu tried to reconstruct the artist's philosophical views. They came to a conclusion that the views represented a kind of Platonic pantheism. The key to reconstruction of Arcimboldo's outlook seemed to them to be in the symbolism of court celebrations staged by the artist, and in his allegorical series. According to Plato's dialogue Timaeus, an immemorial god created the Universe from chaos by a combination of four elements – fire, water, air and the earth, as defines all-encompassing unity. In T. DaCosta Kauffman's works serious interpretation of heritage of Arcimboldo in the context of culture of the 16th century is carried out consistently. Kauffman in general was skeptical about attribution of works by Arcimboldo, and recognized as undoubted originals only four pictures, those with a signature of the artist. He based the interpretation on the text of the unpublished poem by J. Fonteo "The picture Seasons and Four Elements of the imperial artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo". According to Fonteo, the allegorical cycles of Arcimboldo transfer ideas of greatness of the emperor. The harmony in which fruits and animals are combined into images of the human head symbolizes harmony of the empire under the good board of the Habsburgs. Images of seasons and elements are always presented in profile, but thus Winter and Water, Spring and Air, Summer and Fire, Fall and Earth are turned to each other. In each cycle symmetry is also observed: two heads look to the right, and two — to the left. Seasons alternate in an invariable order, symbolizing both constancy of the nature and eternity of board of the Habsburgs' house. The political symbolism also hints at it: at the image of Air there are Habsburg symbols — a peacock and an eagle and Fire is decorated with a chain of the Award of the Golden Fleece, a great master of which by tradition was a head of a reigning dynasty. However it is made of flints and shod steel. Guns also point to the aggressive beginning. The Habsburg symbolics is present in the picture Earth, where the lion's skin designates a heraldic sign of Bohemia. Pearls and corals similar to cervine horns in Water hint at the same. |
In literature and popular culture |
A number of writers from seventeenth-century Spain allude to his work, given that Philip II had acquired some of Arcimboldo's paintings. Grotesque images in the Miguel de Cervantes novel Don Quixote, such as an immense fake nose, recall his work. He also appears in the works of Francisco de Quevedo. Turning to contemporary Latin American literature, the first and last sections of 2666 (2008), Roberto Bolaño's last novel, concern a fictional German writer named Benno von Archimboldi, who takes his pseudonym from Arcimboldo. |
Arcimboldo's painting Water was used as the cover of the 1975 album Masque by the progressive rock band Kansas, and was also shown on the cover of the 1977 Paladin edition of Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness. |
The 1992 novelette The Coming of Vertumnus by Ian Watson counterpoints the innate surrealism of the eponymous work against a drug-induced altered mental state. |
In Harry Turtledove's 1993 fantasy detective novel, The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, the alternate history's version of Arcimboldo incorporated imps – a common, everyday sight in that world – along with fruit, books, etc., into his portraits. |
The logo of the Arkangel Shakespeare audiobooks, released from 1998 onwards, is a portrait of William Shakespeare made out of books, in the style of Arcimboldo's Librarian. |
Arcimboldo-style fruit people appear as characters in the films The Tale of Despereaux (2008) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016), as well as in the Cosmic Osmo video game series. |
A detail from Flora was used on the cover of the 2009 album Bonfires on the Heath by The Clientele. |
Arcimboldo is referenced in the 2020 revival of the Animaniacs, Episode 4, as the main characters create a sculpture of him made of fruit. |
His painting Summer, from his set The Four Seasons, is featured in the Animal Crossing video game series as the "jolly painting". |
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