Giulio Romano

Giulio Romano - Master pupil and heir to Raphael in Rome

Giulio Romano was born in Rome in 1499, but nothing is known about his childhood and youth. His contemporaries knew him as Giulio Pippi, which was a shortening of his real name Giulio di Pietro di Filippo de' Gianuzzi. At the age of fifteen, Giulio Romano joined Raphael's workshop and soon made himself indispensable to the master. He assisted his famous employer and teacher on numerous commissions in the Vatican and at Villa Farnesina, working early on with artists such as Raffaellino de Colle, Giovanni da Udine and Gianfrancesco Penni. With the latter, Romano took over Raphael’s legacy after the master’s death, continuing his work in Rome and thus ensuring that the Raphael workshop was able to maintain its dominant position in the Roman art world. Giulio Romano closely followed the example of his late master at first, completing what he had begun, but showed ever clearer signs of imminent further development.

New paths led Giulio Romano to Mantua

One of Raphael's masterpieces completed by Giulio Romano was probably the world-famous Transfiguration, a painting unique in the history of art. However, while this involved at most a few figures in the background, which can perhaps also be attributed to his colleague Penni, Romano dared to deviate from Raphael's specifications for the first time in the decoration of the Vatican Sala di Constantino for Pope Leo X. In doing so, the artist thus took a major step in the direction of Mannerism - and away from Rome to Mantua, where the ruling Duke Federico II Gonzaga became aware of the promising young artist and made him his court architect without further ado in 1524. Romano went on to fundamentally change the cityscape of Mantua; his pioneering and revolutionary work as an architect culminated in his famous masterpiece, the Palazzo del Tè, the spectacular interior design of which includes Mannerism’s most famous fresco: The masterfully executed painting Fall of the Giants tricks the viewer's eye and conjures the perfect illusion of a dome arching into the distance.

Mannerism as an artistic legacy

Giulio Romano had an immense impact on the Italian art scene from Mantua, which was partly due to his great ability, but was also helped by the city's central location - artists and craftsmen from all parts of northern Italy came together here to work temporarily under Romano and took the impulses they received back home with them. Giulio Romano is impressively remembered by posterity for his magnificent ceiling frescoes with religious and mythological motifs, but he did not always meet the taste of the church, at least in his early years: his I Modi, sixteen erotic drawings from the 1520s, were engraved in copper by Marcantonio Raimondi and garnished with lewd verses by Pietro Aretino, and were immediately banned after publication.

Giulio Romano died in Mantua on 1 November 1546 – shortly after his appointment as architect of St Peters Dome in Rome.