Legacy of a Renaissance Man : Exhibit of Romano’s work provides glimpse into a hectic life

‘That rare Italian master, Giulio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape.’

--William Shakespeare, “The Winter’s Tale”

Because Giulio Romano, who lived in the early years of the 16th Century, was both a rake and a yuppie, it is harder to determine why he came to Mantua than to observe what he left to that city.

An exhibit of his works here, and the attending unprecedented scrutiny into Romano’s life, will offer the first in-depth insight into this prolific master of many arts, who bridged changing styles and values by thumbing his nose at the Renaissance that spawned him.

For nearly 500 years, Giulio, as most art historians call him, lived in the shadow of Renaissance high priest Raphael. But with this exhibition--held in the capricious palace-for-a-mistress that he himself designed--the artist receives a fresh critical look.

The stunning exhibition will provide new ammunition both to those who find this early Mannerist a paean to bad taste, and those who celebrate Giulio’s audacity for bringing wit and entertainment to the hushed salons of Renaissance art while fingering at the leading edge of the Baroque era that would follow.

Either way, Giulio, born in Rome as Giulio Pippi de’ Jannuzzi, was clearly the best apprentice Raphael ever had. When the master died in 1520, Giulio inherited his fortune, his art and his work load, becoming painter-architect-decorator to Pope Julius II and Rome’s nobility. Four years later, though, the sharp-eyed, curly-haired, fun-loving workaholic abandoned Rome for the duchy of Mantua in northern Italy, never to return.

Giulio came, perhaps, to take a job too good to refuse: chief Artist, with a capital ‘A’--no bill too large, no project too grand--for the Duke Federico Gonzaga. The Gonzagas didn’t count for much politically in Renaissance Italy, but they liked their art, and they kept a nice court.

Or else Giulio, then 25, was running from the Roman law because he’d authored a throbbing series of pornographic prints: 16 boldly drawn trysts and nary a fig leaf.

“I don’t think it could have been the pornography. True, Marcantonio Raimondi, who engraved and distributed the drawings, was arrested. But Giulio maintained good relations with the Pope even afterward,” said Amedeo Belluzzi, a researcher in the history of architecture at the University of Florence and secretary to the exhibition committee.

The Giulio Romano Exhibition, which runs until Nov. 12, is the fruit of impressive international cooperation. Museums from Liechtenstein to Leningrad lent their best of Giulio. Public and private sponsors cooperated in restoring the frescoes and the structure itself of the bizarre Palazzo Te that Giulio built on an island for Isabella Boschetti, comely mistress of dashing Federico Gonzaga.

Giulio and the duke were like-minded in their commitment to the artist’s multimedia extravaganzas. Giulio, ever-employed, was always obliging. Together the duke and his Artist conspired to build a cheerful and eccentric palace where the architecture ricochets from nearly classical to almost arch. Every room sways to its own beat: chamber music to Dixieland in the space of a doorway.

“The Duke was so enamored of the excellence of Giulio that he could not live without him,” Mannerist artist-architect-historian Giorgio Vasari wrote in 1550.

Never has so much of Giulio’s work been assembled in one place. Some tapestries and other works are at Mantua’s Palazzo Ducale, but the major exhibit of Giulio’s paintings, drawings and architectural sketches are at his Palazzo Te, which, a visitor quickly learns, was named not for a drink but after the original T-shape of the island on which the palace stood. These days the palace rests, high and dry, in a park.

One of the most striking paintings at the splendidly restored palace is a large--6 by 11 feet--and unabashedly erotic panel on wood called “The Two Lovers.” In the painting, on loan from the Hermitage in Leningrad, a crone with a suggestive ring of keys and her leaping dog spy on a languorous couple in a disarrayed boudoir.

Among the 450 works, there are about 260 pen-and-wash architectural drawings, sketches and details for frescoes from major collections around the world. One group of sketches for the phantasmagorical frescoes in the palace’s Zodiac Hall has been gathered from museums in Haarlem, Dusseldorf, Vienna and Oxford. Nearby are a few of those pornographic drawings that may or may not have upset the Pope.

From our own J. Paul Getty Museum have come two drawings and a painting, “The Birth of Bacchus,” a six-nymph fantasy ascribed to Giulio and his apprentices.

The Getty Grant Program also paid for the restoration of the Hall of the Stuccoes, where a glittering white Roman army, a bas-relief force, marches in stucco around the walls above head level. Floating above such Mannerist wallpaper is a busy ceiling inlaid with lacunaria of fancifully classical motif.

En route to the stucco spectacle, a visitor encounters six life-size stallions teetering on a trompe l’oeil ledge 10 feet off the ground in the palace ballroom. The duke fancied horses, so Giulio immortalized the best in his stables: “The Favorite Brown,” is one brown stallion’s name.

In the Hall of the Giants, a visitor can be awed, or left feeling adrift in a violent 16th-Century cartoon. Big-muscled giants writhe wall to ceiling. Thunderbolts flash, pillars tumble, the floor itself seems to shake in Giulio’s portrayal of mighty Jove’s victory over pretentious but ultimately puny Titans, mere humans who dared try to storm heaven.

“No man could ever imagine seeing a more horrible or dreadful or realistic work of art,” Vasari wrote.

Giulio’s palace and its borrowed treasures in the suburbs of this ancient and pleasant city of 60,000 is open every day. There have been large crowds so far, particularly on weekends, and mostly of foreign tourists and visitors from other parts of Italy, according to Paola Giovetti, who heads the exhibition staff.

So painstaking is the exhibition that Federico and Isabella might feel at home again in their palace built for fun. They probably would even have enjoyed the life-sized 20th-Century reconstruction of Giulio’s long-gone house in Rome. Now standing proudly in the garden behind the palace, the copy was built by students from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, using special Styrofoam that reproduces Giulio’s contrivedly rustic facades with amazing exactness.

Newfangled stuff, that Styrofoam, and more’s the pity: Imagine what Giulio could have done with a ton or two of it.