Word: giulio
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...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...
...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...