TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110689/p106

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.6 KB | 145 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 106

Between The Sistine And Disney


The licentious genius of Mantua's Giulio Romano

By Robert Hughes


    Giulio Romano was so well known in his time that he is the
only painter mentioned in any of Shakespeare's plays. Famous,
and rather vulgar. If Raphael was the epitome of grace among
artists of the High Renaissance and Michelangelo the paragon of
sublimity, then Giulio was all licentious facility. So ran the
judgment of our Victorian forebears, who could not quite forgive
Raphael's best pupil for his indelicacy. An air of brilliant
second-rateness still clings to his name. Those who can thrust
their way through the crowds in Palazzo Te in Mantua and manage
a long look at the enormous Giulio Romano show that has been the
city's main event this fall (it closes on Nov. 12) will have the
best chance any public has had since the artist died in 1546 to
judge him for themselves.

    Although Giulio Pippi de'Giannuzzi was born in Rome, took
the city's name, worked in Raphael's studio and, as a very young
man, must have known both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci,
it was in Mantua that he found his voice as an artist. As
architect and painter to Federico II Gonzaga, he became Mantua's
virtual artistic dictator in his 20s and remained so until he
died at the early age of 47. There, projects poured from him in
an undiverted stream: not only frescoes and panel paintings and
the innumerable sketches that preceded them, but also de signs
for palaces and villas and town houses (including his own house
in Via Poma), for heraldic emblems, tapestries, urns, salvers,
jewelry and every other class of luxury object a Renaissance
patron might feel the itch to have. Indeed, Giulio's first job
in Mantua was a tomb for the Duke's favorite dog, a long-legged
bitch that had expired while giving birth to a litter of
puppies.

    The instrument of this colossal output was drawing. Giulio
was incontestably a great draftsman. Drawing was as natural to
him as speech; Raphael, in fact, took him on as a studio
assistant when Giulio was not much more than ten. The grace, the
spontaneity of his pen line -- rushing over the paper as though
impelled by the lightest inflection of thought, quick but always
controlled, strengthened by brown washes that confirm its
structure -- does not always translate to the paintings and
frescoes, where it seems heavier and over determined. But with
Giulio, design and invention were inseparable, and their
combination is worn so lightly that one may not realize how
difficult were the problems he set for himself. How do you
create long processional friezes of figures based on a Roman
triumph, as in the Stucco Room at Palazzo Te, without
monotonously repeating poses and gestures? How do you cram an
imagined temple with such an excessive throng of spectators
that the Circumcision of Christ looks more like a PEN dinner
thrown by Gayfryd Steinberg, and yet keep the action coherent?
Virtuosity was in Giulio's nature.

    The big change in his fortunes came in 1524, when he was
25. Giulio was approached by the Venetian writer and rake
Pietro Aretino, who wanted illustrations for his Sonetti
Lussuriosi (Salacious Sonnets). Giulio produced 16 drawings,
each depicting a handsome couple rutting with the energy of
blacksmiths in a forge, and sometimes in ways that would give
you, me or Jesse Helms a hernia. These, like so much of Giulio's
other work, may have come from a classical prototype: the
spintriae, or tokens, stamped with obscene designs that were
used for entry to Roman brothels in the second century A.D. The
engraver Marcantonio Raimondi turned Giulio's I Modi (Ways, for
short) into prints, and in this form they became enormously
popular. They are still the most famous examples of visual
pornography in Western art, although four centuries of attrition
by prudery have destroyed almost all of them.

    This outburst of randiness may have cost Giulio his Roman
career. Raphael was dead, and his former assistants were now
maneuvering on their own for the big commissions. But with
Luther raging against Vatican corruption and a reformist chill
blowing through the papal court, Pope Clement VII was not going
to make a pornographer his official painter. At this point
Baldassare Castiglione, Raphael's friend and author of The
Courtier, fixed Giulio up with his job in Mantua.

    There he had no rivals and no clergy breathing censoriously
down the back of his neck. Federico II Gonzaga's court was a
secular one; not even his tamest eulogists could have called
the Duke pious. He was, however, brave, generous, greedy,
obsessed with his own virtu (which meant prowess, not virtue)
and determined to go down in history for his martial skills, his
classical learning and his devotion to all vertical and
horizontal forms of the chase. In Giulio, this son of Isabella
d'Este found a court artist whose libidinousness and
intelligence fit his own. Both men moved naturally in the
imaginative world of a recovered antiquity -- the world of
Apuleius and Ovid's Metamorphoses, the brutal sharp humor of
Martial's epigrams, the fantasies of a Golden Age and the
pseudo-scientific world view of astrology.

    The great expression of their relationship was Palazzo Te
itself, which Giulio designed from the ground up as a pleasure
pavilion for Federico. This rectangular, single-story building,
with its courtyards, pools, screen colonnade and enfilade of
frescoed rooms, was Giulio's masterpiece. Its architecture
would inspire many future designers, among them Inigo Jones and
Sir John Vanbrugh. But its frescoes, which have been thoroughly
and sympathetically cleaned in recent years, would be no less
influential.

    Some were almost impenetrably learned: no ordinary visitor
today knows enough about Renaissance astrology to "read" the
arcane designs in the Room of the Winds. Others are quite
straightforward, like those in the chamber in which Federico had
Giulio and his assistants paint life-size effigies of his
favorite horses, with their names written underneath them. In
between there is an amazing variety of images, some of which
seem to teeter between grandeur and farce in a way unheard of
in Renaissance art before.

    In the Room of Psyche, the physical effervescence and the
characters of the picnicking gods are set forth as explicitly
as in a Roman pantomime, and one can easily see why Giulio had
such an influence on Rubens and Poussin. Lusting, half-tipsy,
bare bottomed and prone to fits of hilarity and rage, Giulio's
Olympians cavort and cuckold one another across the walls to
the accompaniment of all manner of phallic puns. When
sword-brandishing Mars is seen pursuing Adonis, whom he has just
caught in flagrante with his wife Venus, even the antique
statues in the background display their truncated arms as a sign
of impending castration.

    But of course the most popular thing in Palazzo Te, now as
then, is the Room of the Giants, where Giulio (whose taste for
apocalyptic catastrophe may have been sparked by talking to
Leonardo in Rome) painted Ovid's story of the gods' revenge on
the rebellious earth giants. These bearded, stumbling palookas
in their peasants' breeches, crushed by the fall of rocks and
masonry, are done with literally colossal gusto. The whole
windowless chamber seems ready, for a moment, to totter and fall
on your head. No room in Italy gives you a clearer sense of the
mannerist delight in bizarre illusion. If one could imagine a
halfway point between Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes and
the gee-whiz delights of Walt Disney, this would be it.