Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2008)

ZOLTÁN KÁRPÁTI: After Polidoro: A Newly Identified Drawing by Livio Mehus

AFTER POLIDORO ANEWLY IDENTIFIED DRAWING BY LIVIO MEHUS ZOLTÁN KÁRPÁTI According to Giorgio Vasari, there was not one apartment, palace, garden or villa in Rome in which one could not see frescos by Polidoro and Maturino.

1 Mthough this was obviously an exaggeration, the sentence is still more than a rhetoric device. From the early 1520's onwards Polidoro da Caravaggio (ca.1499-ca.1543) and the less well-known Florentine artist, Maturino da Firenze (active 1520M528), decorated more than forty façades in Rome with distinctive monochrome painted friezes that imitated antique marble and bronze reliefs.

2 Their chiaroscuro frescos were regarded by their contemporaries as embodiments of the perfect alVantica style and generations of artists copied them as models for their works. None of the façades became as renowned as the ones executed for the Palazzo Milesi on Via della Maschera d'Oro. They completed this project not long before the Sack of Rome and it is undoubtedly their largest-scale and iconographically most sophisticated work.

3 The frescos on the four-level façade depict ancient gods and heroes, allegorical figures, classical scenes as well as antique-style vases, helmets and trophies.

4 Vasari himself praised this façade with great enthusiasm and the unceasing esteem of art-experts is best illustrated by Luigi Lanzi mentioning them at the end of the eighteenth century as Polidoro's most important works." This unparalleled popularity was not generated only by art theorists: none of Polidoro's other works were copied as much as these frescos. The drawings made after them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alone amounted to hundreds and virtually all the artists who stayed in Rome for any length of time made copies of this famous façade/' Its motifs can be seen in the sketchbooks of Girolamo da Carpi (1501M566), Battista Franco (1510-1561) and Anbrogio Giovanni Figino (1553-1608), and its bizarre forms also inspired the art of Luca Giordano (1643-1705) and Rubens (1577-1640). Polidoro's contemporaries expressed their