Giulio Romano

Giulio Romano
Portrait of Giulio Romano ( c. 1536 ), oil on canvas by Titian, 101×86 cm
Born	Giulio Pippi c. 1499 Rome, Papal States
Died	1 November 1546 (aged 46–47) Mantua, Duchy of Mantua
Known for	painting, fresco, architecture

Giulio Pippi (c. 1499 – 1 November 1546), known as Giulio Romano (US: /ˌdʒuːljoʊ rəˈmɑːnoʊ/ JOOL-yoh rə-MAH-noh( Italian: [ˈdʒuːljo roˈmaːno]) and sometimes known in French as Jules Romain, was an Italian 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 palace of leisure 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

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

Giulio Romano — Properly GIULIO DEI GIANNUZZI, also known as GIULIO PIPPI.

A famous architect and painter, the best-known of Raphael's pupils, and the unique representative of the so-called "Roman School"; b. at Rome in 1492; d. at Mantua in 1546. At the age of 19, Giulio placed himself under Raphael, who had just finished after three years (1509-12) the Halls of the Segnatura and Heliodorus. In 1514, Raphael was appointed general overseer of works by Leo X, conducted in 1519 the excavations of ancient Rome, and found it difficult to carry out all his undertakings. It came thus to pass that the assistant was soon the factotum and right hand of the master, who during the later portion of his career seldom found time (except for a few portraits) to take a brush into his hands.

As an artist, Giulio has no originality; as a painter, he is merely a tempérament, a prodigious worker. His manual dexterity is unaccompanied by any greatness of conception or high moral principle. He enlarged and executed in fresco or on canvas the drawings and studies completed by Raphael for his pictures. In this way were completed, within eight years, "Fire in the Borgo" (1513), the cartons of the "Acts of the Apostles" (1512-14), the loggias of the Vatican (1514-1519), the frescoes of the Farnesina (1518), and many other famous works such as the "Lo Spasimo" (Christ bearing the Cross), the "Pearl", the "Virgin with the Fish" (Madrid), the "St. Michael" of the Louvre, and "The Holy Family" executed for Francis I (1518). With all his cleverness Giulio never caught the real glow of Raphael's genius; the master's divine ideas became vulgarized in passing through Giulio's more material brain. Moreover he was carried away by the power of Michelangelo's works (the Sistine Roof was uncovered in 1512), which, however, he misinterpreted as the brute force of physical strength. Thus Raphael's graceful figures often became in Giulio's hands coarse muscular giants like the "Ignudi" and the "Prophets". Giulio is also responsible for the brick-coloured tones and plaster flesh-tints of the men and women in Raphael's later works, the artistic defects of which are in many cases entirely due to Giulio. A number of the master's most beautiful conceptions have come down to us only under this imperfect form, spoiled for ever by the triviality and lack of delicacy of the execution, and the pity of it is that, on the strength of Raphael's signature, these works seemed to impress the seal of sanction on many serious defects in the French School of the seventeenth century. Much time and discussion would have been saved if in arguing over the famous "Transfiguration" (1520), for instance, it were admitted that in its present state, as completed by Giulio, it is impossible to say what the master's original idea was, since the secret of it is buried with him in the grave. As for the "Battle of Constantine", and the "Coronation of the Virgin", it would be as well to admit that they retain nothing whatever of Raphael.

Although the sole interest of this early portion of Giulio's career consists in the light it throws on Raphael's work, it is of greater artistic importance than all Giulio's subsequent independent efforts. Yet even they are not without interest. They show us Giulio developing, though with undoubted talent, some of the defects and deadly vices which lay hidden in the Renaissance movement. The most serious of these defects is dilettanteism, or virtuosity for its own sake. Giulio had not with impunity devoted ten years simply to the execution of another's ideas; he came to believe that in art the thought is of no account, the form everything. The necessary connexion between the idea and its expression, between art and life, quite escaped him. This was the grave defect of the Italian spirit — the abuse of art, the worship of form, the indifference to subject, and it could hardly fail to prove fatal to an artist whom it had obsessed.

An opportunity of translating this erroneous principle to canvas on a large scale was afforded to Giulio by the Duke of Mantua. For 22 years (1524-1546) the artist was absolute master of all the works of art executed in that town. He entirely remodelled the interior decoration of the old palace (the Palazzo di Corte), lavishing on it all the resources of his inexhaustible fancy. He refashioned the interior of the cathedral; he raised the important church of San Benedetto, and he built from roof to cellar the famous Palace of Tajetto, near the gates of the town.

It is especially in these two palaces, which were almost entirely painted by him or his pupils, that Giulio marks an epoch in the history of art. His lively but superficial fancy, incapable of deep emotion, of religious feeling, or even of observation, attracted him to neutral subjects, to mythological paintings, and imaginary scenes from the world of fable. Therein under the cloak of humanism, he gave expression to a sensualism rather libertine than poetical, an epicureanism unredeemed by any elevated or noble quality. It is this that wins for Giulio his distinctive place in art. His conception of form was never quite original; it was always a clever and "bookish" compromise between Raphael and Michelangelo. His sense of colour grows ever louder and uglier, his ideas are void of finesse, whatever brilliancy they show is second-hand. His single distinctive characteristic is the doubtful ease with which he played with the commonplaces of pagandom. In this respect at least, paintings like those of the "Hall of Psyche" (1532) are historical landmarks. It is the first time (even if we include the Farnesina) that an appeal is made to the senses with all the brutal frankness of a modern work. Unlike Raphael's "Galatea" and his "Three Graces", examples of Elysian happiness in a race in the state of innocence, Giulio's decorations resemble saturnalia of lubricity itself. The vulgarity of the drawing leaves no illusion as to the nature of its intention; nothing remains of the ancient myth, thus stripped of all its ideal signification, but what serves to excite the senses. Thus art, losing all moral import, sinks inevitably to the level of a game of conventional rules, and the cloak of fiction serves only to disguise the grossness of the instincts, which have ousted every laudable ideal.

Such was the result of "art for art's sake" in his case, and the danger of such principles was aggravated by the superstitious reverence for the antique in the sixteenth century. The word antique was held to purify and sanctify everything: all things were lawful in the name of erudition, the antique became a fetish. In the Hall of Troy (1534-1538) in the Palazzo di Corte, and in his "Triumph of Titus and Vespasian" in the Louvre, Giulio, following in the footsteps of Mantegna, had given evidence that he too was among the learned, the connoisseurs, the men of disinterested culture, and no doubt concluded that he was thereby entitled to dispense with the claims of morality in the rest of his works. It was not long until the same specious reasoning became the fashion in Europe. Primatice introduced it to the Court of Fontainebleau; and Rubens, who spent eight years (1600-1608) at the Court of Mantua, brought it back with him to Flanders. Giulio is the originator of those lascivious pictures, dating from 1630 to 1638, which are in the Prado and Torre de la Pareja galleries at Madrid. Mantua, Giulio's town, rather than Rome was the teacher of the seventeenth century. The consequences of these principles were disastrous. The antique, indeed, could only be the religion of the few, but, by constituting fable the sole vehicle of the beautiful, Giulio, vulgarian though he was, fell into the error of "aristocratizing" art, and thus of severing its indispensable bond with the real. Henceforth its public became fewer; art, becoming the property of an intellectual class, was exposed to all the risks inherent in caste and party spirit. It was now a privileged possession, a code-language for use only among the initiated. Emancipated from morality (thanks to the sophism of the antique), deprived of the necessary support of reality, and immune from the common-sense verdict of the general public, it gave utterance only to aimless, useless, soulless, lifeless abstractions. As an example may be cited the most famous of Giulio's works, the "Hall of the Giants" (1532-1534) in the Palace of the Tajetto. It is difficult to say whether the artist was here the dupe of his imagination, or whether the work was the result of a jocose wager, for it is certainly a freak, a shock like those that used to startle the yokels in the Gardens of Castello and of Pratolino. But the effect here is brought about by such palpable illusion, the imposture is so enormous, it demands so many concessions from the spectator, it presupposes such a lack of all critical power on his part, that it is hard to understand such a pleasantry, though for Giulio's sake one would gladly wish it such. The effort is so out of proportion to the result that one cannot repress a feeling of pity. Such a lack of dignity comes as a shock. There is, of course, in the Italian genius a substratum of scepticism, of irony, of parody, which outsiders can never quite realize. But was it worth while to heap Pelion on Ossa, to shake the whole world, to create such a cataclysm of colour, merely to raise a smile? Or can it be that the logical outcome of the doctrine of "art for art's sake" is nothing more or less than the bizarre and the burlesque?

Distinguished by such characteristics and marked by such defects, Giulio Romano occupies nevertheless an important place in the history of art. More than any other, he aided in propogating the pseudo-classical, half-pagan style of art so fashionable during the seventeenth century, and it is mainly through his influence that after the year 1600 we find so few religious painters in Europe. It was reserved to a Dutchman — Rembrandt — to reconcile art and morality once more. By his influence as a pupil of Raphael, Giulio contributed to spread the evil germs of Italian art — carelessness of finish, bravura, lack of sincerity, lack of truth, mannerism, love of the grotesque. He painted many altar-pieces; the best is the "Stoning of St. Stephen" in S. Stefano at Genoa, executed before leaving Rome, when the mantle of Raphael was still on him. His Madonnas, such as the "Madonna della Gatta" (Naples), the "Madonna della Catina" (Dresden), are mere genre pictures without feeling or religious depth, having the sort of abstract beauty we expect in bas-reliefs. The "Nativity" of the Louvre is an attempt to reproduce the chiaroscuro of Corregio.

VASARI, Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, ed. MILANESI (Florence, 1878); D'ARCO, Istoria della vita e delle opere di Giulio Romano (1838; 2nd ed. with appendix, 1842); Arti ed artefici di Mantova (Mantua, 1857); WOERMANN, Geschichte der Malerei, II (Leipzig, 1882); CROWE AND CAVALCASELLE, History of Italian Painting; BUCKHARDT, Der Cicerone, ed. BODE (Berlin, 1879); BERENSON, Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance (New York, 1903).

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 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.