Polidoro da Caravaggio

One of Raphael’s most gifted pupils, Polidoro made a specialty of decorating the facades of palaces with grisaille paintings in imitation of antique reliefs during the years between his master’s death in 1520 and the sack of Rome in 1527. In his Vite, Vasari celebrated the artist as the most successful facade designer of his time, recording that “there is no apartment, palace, garden, or villa in Rome that does not contain some work by Polidoro.”¹ Polidoro’s facade decorations, most of which by their very nature have disappeared, constitute the most important lost chapter of cinquecento Roman art. The painter’s surviving drawings, such as the present one, can, however, provide an idea of the original aspect of his mural paintings and show that he was an artist of remarkable and highly individual genius.

The subject of the Morgan drawing has been tentatively identified with a moment in the story of Perillus, narrated by Ovid in his Tristia (3, 11:39–54). According to Achim Gnann, who connected the sheet to a lost facade by Polidoro in via dei Coronari, Rome, the present drawing represents the inventor Perillus brought in front of the tyrant of Sicily, Phalaris.² Perillus had devised for Phalaris an instrument of torture consisting of a life-size bronze bull in which the tyrant could kill his enemies by locking them inside and slowly roasting them. In a cruel turn of events, Phalaris commanded that Perillus should be its first victim.

Polidoro’s frescoes illustrating the stories of Perillus are mentioned in a passage of Vasari’s Vite where the biographer records two episodes depicted on the facade: the condemnation of Peril- lus—to which the Morgan drawing seems related—and the dramatic epilogue of the story, when the inventor is forced to enter the bronze bull. This last moment of Polidoro’s narration is preserved in two engravings and in a drawing in the British Museum attributed to a follower of Girolamo da Carpi.³ The recto of that drawing depicts the same figures found in the left side of the Morgan composition, thereby at least suggesting that both scenes were copied from the same facade painted by Polidoro in via dei Coronari.

It has also been proposed that the Morgan drawing relates to an extant fragment of a facade frescoed by Polidoro on a now-lost house on Piazza Madama, Rome, with paintings depicting the triumph of the consul Aemilius Paulus and other Roman military campaigns, but the surviving fragment, now in Palazzo Barberini, has major differences from the Morgan drawing. If actually connected to the decoration, therefore, it would have to be considered a working drawing, extensively modified during the creative process that led to the final work. Even though the function of the Morgan sheet is not yet certain, stylistic comparisons with Polidoro’s drawings would suggest that it was executed around the beginning of the 1520s, before the painter’s departure for southern Italy in 1527.

Developing the composition in a horizontal format as an antique frieze and using a monochromatic medium in imitation of the effect of a classical bas-relief, Polidoro declared his fascination for antique Roman sculpture and inspired a trend of all’antica facade decoration. Polidoro’s external paintings became a kind of academy for the future generations until at least the late seventeenth century, and his drawings were a crucial vehicle for the diffusion and the appreciation of this genre.

—MSB

Footnotes:

1. See Vasari 1996, 1:895; Vasari 1878–85, 5:150.
2. Gnann 1997, 86–87, 100–101.
3. British Museum, London, inv. 1950,0816.3. See Gere and Pouncey 1983, 1: no. 175.