Word: giulio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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 overdetermined. But with Giulio, design and invention were inseparable, and their combination is worn...
...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...
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...
...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...