Word: mantua
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...Mantua, a show surveys the architect, designer and painter who was the city's aesthetic dictator in the 16th century and whose robust frescoes fall midway between Michelangelo and Walt Disney...
Partly because he worked from sketches, engravings or memories of sculpture, Reni's heroic male nudes -- the Samson Victorious, and the various figures of Hercules done for the Gonzaga in Mantua -- have a sculptural intensity that blots out the rest of the painting. Background figures scurry about in deep recession, half transparent, like wraiths out of Tintoretto; the landscape is simplified into broad plains; against this, the single magnified body rises up. One remembers only the imposing structure turning, as it were, before the eye, displaying its stresses and bulges -- straining for embodiment and yet defeating it with...