TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/110689/p106

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 8KB | 133 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.