Word: giulio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...prolific, licentious genius of Giulio Romano...