Sebastiano del Piombo, Polyphemus, fresco, 1511-12, Rome, Villa Farnesina

I am continuing my writings about sixteenth-century caricature, grotesque (see also here) and what I’d call proto-cartooning with an article in the anthology Grotesque and Caricature: Leonardo to Bernini, ably edited by Rebecca Norris and Lucia Tantardini and just published by Brill. The article, “Sebastiano’s Caricatural Gesture and the Path to Idealism”, focuses on Sebastiano del Piombo who never actively pursued the grotesque or even the broadly caricatural, but nevertheless incorporate a certain caricatural simplification, even abstraction, in his art that among other things strengthened the spiritual message of his art.

The book has plenty of fascinating articles on the subject of early modern caricature and grotesque. Well worth seeking out for people interested in the subject.

Rebecca Norris and Lucia Tantardini, eds., Grotesque and Caricature – Leonardo to Bernini, Leiden: Brill, 2024, pp. 55-78. Find it at your local art library. See more here.

A bit late to announce this here, but I contributed an article, entitled “The Chigi Graffiti”, on the graffiti on the walls of the loggia di Galatea at the Villa Farnesina in Rome, under the famous fresco by Raphael, the Triumph of Galatea (c. 1512-13), as well as the somewhat less famous one of Polyphemus by Sebastiano del Piombo (1511). These comprise a range of caricatured figures and heads as well as more naturalistic drawings and, some clearly by Sebastiano and some possibly — even probably — by Raphael.

I examine these closely in my article, which was published in the catalogue for the recently closed exhibition at the Farnesina, Raffaello e l’antico nella villa di Agostino Chigi, curated by my friend and colleague Costanza Barbieri. It was a great show, which brought back to the Farnesina a number of the antique sculptures that were in the collection of the villa’s original owner, the hugely wealthy banker Agostino Chigi, from the collections in which they’re dispersed today.

My examination of the graffiti is the latest in a number of articles I’ve written focusing on caricature and doodling by some of the great artists of the renaissance. You can get the catalogue here.

I’ve recently had a couple of scholarly articles published in two anthology volumes. I hope you will check them out.

One is a treatment, my most comprehensive yet, of Titian’s engagement with reproductive printmaking, from his scattered interactions with printmakers working after his designs and finished works in the earlier parts of his career, his involvement in Venetian literary circles from the later 1520s onwards and its manifestation in book illustration and print portraiture, to his increased collaboration with printers and printmakers issuing prints after his paintings from the 1550s onwards, culminating in his famous work with Cornelis Cort in the mid 1560s through 1571.

The article is included in the anthology Titian: Themes and Variations, edited by the great Peter Humfrey. It compiles new scholarship on Titian’s practice of replication and variation throughout his career and across media, written by many of the top scholars in the field. I’m honoured to be included.

The other article was developed from a conference paper I gave during covid for a Roman conference on Raphael in 2021, postponed like so many other things involving Raphael, from the anniversary year of 2020. It examines the close creative exchange, competition and mutual inspiration between Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo in Rome during the second decade of the sixteenth century and beyond. I have new things to say about Raphael’s appropriations from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, his and Sebastiano’s race to complete mural paintings in oil, the internal chronology of their respective renditions of the Transfiguration of Christ and a proposal about Michelangelo’s contribution to Sebastiano’s never-complete altarpiece for the Chigi chapel in Santa Maria della Pace.

It is published in the volume Himmlische und irdische Liebe: Ein anderer Blick auf Raffael, edited by Yvonne Dohna Schlobitten, Claudia Bertling Biaggini, Claudia Cieri Via, a rich compendium of work by a wide variety of scholars on this crucial period in the history of modern Western art.

Do take a look at either or both when you’re next at your academic library. I also recommend getting them for your own bookshelves of course, but realise that that is a longer shot.

Sebastiano del Piombo, Study of Martha and other figures for the Raising of Lazarus, 1517. Frankfurt, Städel

Last week I was a guest on the live culture evening broadcast og Italian Radio 3 along with my great colleague and friend Costanza Barbieri to talk about Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo on the occassion of our new(ish) book The Compass and the Mirror. If you can deal with my pessimo italiano, I think it turned out pretty informative, especially due to Costanza’s presence there. And if you just can’t get enough, here’s the video of the book presentation we did at the Accademia San Luca last autumn.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the book presentation at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome of The Compass and the Mirror – Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo that I have edited and contributed to. Based on research conducted and insights gained during the 2017 exhibition Michelangelo & Sebastiano that I organised at the National Gallery, the book presents a wide variety of new research on the two artists and the context of their collaboration. It is published by Brepols and you can read more here.

It was a real privilege to be able to organise a book presentation of this sort and to hear the critiques of my esteemed colleagues Professor Alessandro Zuccari of the Sapienze University of Rome and Cecilia Frosinini, faculty member at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence. Both had pointed and important remarks that I will take forward in future work. You can see the entire presentation above, but note that the two respondents speak in Italian and only I, out of necessity, respond in English at the end.

Matthias Wivel — The Compass and the Mirror

Elena Calvillo — Friendship, Medium and the Diverging Lives of Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo

Piers Baker-Bates — Copies and Versions in Sebastiano’s Art? The Christ Carrying the Cross

Sheryl E. Reiss — A Word Portrait of a Medici Maecenas: Giulio de’ Medici (Pope Clement VII) as Patron of Art

Arnold Nesselrath — Raphael: Of Heirs and Pretenders

Matthias Wivel and Rachel Billinge — Sebastiano’s Vich Triptych

Carlo Piga — Da Michelangelo a Sebastiano: antiche suggestioni e moderne invenzioni nel ciclo decorativo della Cappella Borgherini in San Pietro in Montorio a Roma

Stefania Pasti — Aperietur in tempore: Sebastiano del Piombo and the Borgherini Chapel in the Light of Prophetic Readings

Paul Joannides — A New Drawing by Sebastiano del Piombo for the Semi-Dome of the Borgherini Chapel

Costanza Barbieri — Sebastiano as Portraitist and a Case Study: The Portrait of Michelangelo Pointing to His Drawings

Oriana Sartiani — A Portrait of Michelangelo Attributed to Sebastiano del Piombo: Technical Examination, Discoveries, and Treatment

Simonetta Antellini — L’originalità compositiva della Nascita della Vergine di Sebastiano del Piombo

Daniela Luzi — ‘Il bel secreto’: La pittura sperimentale sulla pietra di Sebastiano nella Cappella Chigi

Morten Steen Hansen — The Readings of Angels: Sebastiano del Piombo and the Politics of the Immaculate Conception

Andrea Donati — Marcello Venusti, Michelangelo and the Legacy of Sebastiano del Piombo

Charles Robertson — Michelangelo’s Last Judgement: Sebastiano del Piombo’s Contribution

Do also tune into the contributions by my colleagues Thomas Dalla Costa and Giorgio Tagliaferro who talked about Raphael and Titian and Raphael and Paolo Veronese, respectively.

Michelangelo & Sebastiano, with Dr Matthias Wivel and Dr Piers Baker-Bates from Colnaghi Foundation on Vimeo.

It’s Christmas time, so here’s a treat for the two and half people who might care. I was searching for something else and happened upon this video through the Colnaghi Foundation website. It records a conversation I had at their premises in London in the spring of 2017 with my colleague Piers Baker-Bates on Sebastiano del Piombo, his relationship to Michelangelo and his fortuna critica in Spain (a particular specialty of Piers’). Of course the impetus was the exhibition I had organised at the National Gallery, to which Piers had provided invaluable assistance.

I was aware at the time that it was being filmed but forgot all about it, so it’s nice to see it’s been online for a while. It’s very nerdy, but that was also kind of the brief, and frankly a relief at a time when I was doing many more general — and also enjoyable! — introductions to the subject. Plus, it’s always nice to chat with Piers. Enjoy!

Krazy Kat Sunday page 6 October, 1940

Oh, and in the latest issue of The Burlington Magazine you can read my review of Claudia Bertling Biaggini’s book on Sebastiano del Piombo, Felix Pictor.

Briefly, it aims to be a focused show, examining the extraordinary friendship and collaboration between Michelangelo (1475-1564) and the Venetian painter and expat to Rome Sebastiano Luciani, known to posterity as Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547). Michelangelo is not known for his ability or willingness to collaborate, in part due to his own efforts in his later years to play down any such activity, but also because he genuinely worked best alone, or with assistants who were essentially subservient to him.

Remarkably, the partnership with Sebastiano, which started in late 1511 and lasted on-off, and mostly in long-distance form — Michelangelo in Florence and Sebastiano in Rome — between 1516 and 1534, was essentially a collaboration among equals. Yes, it was asymmetrical, as one would expect of any collaboration involving one of the greatest artists who ever lived, but each of the two men brought their unique ideas and sensibilities to their joint projects. Essentially, Michelangelo would provide Sebastiano with drawings which he would use in his paintings, but in many different ways and often quite independently of any oversight from Michelangelo. Sebastiano was hugely influenced by Michelangelo and spent most of his career assimilating his example, but he did so in his own, highly original fashion.

At the time of their falling-out in 1536, apparently over the choice of medium (oil or fresco) that Michelangelo would use for the Sistine Last Judgment — the great project that had brought him back to Rome, Sebastiano had developed a monumental, uniquely still and intensely spiritual style of painting that would prove immensely influential of painters of the following generations, not just in Rome but across Europe, from Caravaggio to Poussin and even Zurbarán.

Anyway, all this and much more — including the dramatic historical context, one of upheaval, war, schism and theological and artistic rejuvenation — will be explored in the exhibition and in its catalogue, which is shipping from its distributor as of yesterday. Edited by me, it features scholarship by, among others, Costanza Barbieri, Paul Joannides, Piers Baker-Bates, Silvia Danesi Squarzina and Timothy Verdon. Read more (and purchase) here.

The above video was made a few months ago to coincide with the opening of the Sansovino Frames exhibition at the National Gallery. We had just successfully acquired the beautiful Venetian (non-Sansovino) frame which now adorns Titian’s Allegory of Prudence, partly through crowdfunding, and which features in the clip. I think it encapsulates well some of the very real pleasures of working with great artworks: the fact that details count; the kind of holistic thinking the works demand of you when you plan their display; and not least the passion and expertise that they demand. I appear for a brief moment and contribute nothing, but do watch the video for the insight it gives into our framing department and the great work Peter Schade and his staff do there.

OK, here are some links: