In the shadow of Polidoro. Pirro Ligorio as a draftsman, Ginette Vagenheim To cite this version: Ginette Vagenheim. In the shadow of Polidoro. Pirro Ligorio as a draftsman,. Pirro Ligorio’s Worlds Antiquarianism, Classical Erudition and the Visual Arts in the Late Renaissance, 34, 2019, Brill’s studies on art, art history, and intellectual history, 9789004382657. hal-02966890 HAL Id: hal-02966890 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02966890 Submitted on 14 Oct 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Pirro Ligorio’s Worlds Antiquarianism, Classical Erudition and the Visual Arts in the Late Renaissance Edited by Fernando Loffredo Ginette Vagenheim LEIDEN | BOSTON For use by the Author only | © 2019 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents Preface xi Anthony Grafton List of Figures XIv Introduction: Pirro Ligorio’s Worlds, or, an Invitation to Navigate the Boundaries of Truth 1 Fernando Loffredo and Ginette Vagenheim Pirro Ligorio versus Philology 1 Pirro Ligorio’s Antiquarian Philology 25 Robert W. Gaston 2 Editing Ligorio’s Epigraphic Manuscripts: New Discoveries and New Issues 39 Silvia Orlandi 3 The Epigraphical Forgeries in the Construction of Pirro Ligorio’s Libro XXXIX on Roman Antiquities 51 Nicoletta Balistreri 4 Drawing Circles: Pirro Ligorio’s Working Methods as Evidenced in His Numismatic Manuscripts 66 Sarah E. Cox Pirro Ligorio and the Ancient World 5 Pirro Ligorio’s Evidence for the Cult of Jupiter Dolichenus in Rome and Religious Life at the Barracks 85 Blair Fowlkes-Childs 6 Pirro Ligorio and Sicilian Antiquities: Indifference or an Unwitting “Short Circuit”? 98 Federico Rausa For use by the Author only | © 2019 Koninklijke Brill NV viii Contents 7 Looking for Sirens: Ancient Sites in Naples According to Pirro Ligorio 146 Anna Schreurs-Morét Pirro Ligorio and the Renaissance Villa 8 Pirro Ligorio’s Casino of Pius IV Reconsidered, or, Why People Love Ligorio’s Buildings 181 Arnold Nesselrath 9 Pirro Ligorio and St Peter’s Basilica: More on the Historical-Christian Investigations and on a Medieval “Reuse” in the Casino of Pius IV 200 Carmelo Occhipinti 10 The Villa d’Este at Tivoli and Its Gardens in Marc-Antoine Muret’s Tivoli Cycle of Poems and Uberto Foglietta’s Tyburtinum 218 George Hugo Tucker Pirro Ligorio and the Visual Arts 11 Pirro Ligorio’s Oxford Album 255 Ian Campbell 12 In the Shadow of Polidoro da Caravaggio: Pirro Ligorio as a Draftsman 273 Ginette Vagenheim 13 “Pirro Ligorio Neapolitan Painter,” 1534–1549 (With a New Addition on His Late Activity as an Architect) 296 Patrizia Tosini 14 Pirro Ligorio and Sculpture, or, on the Reproducibility of Antiquity 324 Fernando Loffredo Conclusions 360 Marcello Fagiolo (with an appendix by Fabio Colonnese) For use by the Author only | © 2019 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents ix Bibliography 375 Index of Ancient Names 404 Index of Modern Authors 412 Index of Topography 419 Index of Inscriptions 425 For use by the Author only | © 2019 Koninklijke Brill NV Chapter 12 In the Shadow of Polidoro da Caravaggio: Pirro Ligorio as a Draftsman Ginette Vagenheim Nel dipingere, bisogna seguire Raffaello, nello stile e nel disegno Michelangelo e Polydoro Pirro Ligorio, On the Nobility of the Arts1 ∵ The first study dedicated to the drawings of the Neapolitan painter and an- tiquarian Pirro Ligorio (c.1512–1583) dates back to 1971, when John Gere pub- lished, in Master Drawings, a catalogue of 29 drawings that he considered the “early drawings” of the artist.2 In other words, these were drawings by Ligorio that constituted for Gere “a group attributable to him in the period before his style was finally formed which throws some light on a hitherto obscure aspect of his artistic activity”.3 On the other hand, he maintained that, “the style of the artist’s full maturity was known enough through some specimens from his hand, mostly in his preferred medium of neat pen and golden-brown wash, peopled by his characteristic stocky rubbery, somewhat oriental-looking little figures with their tightly curled hair, prominent noses and large eyes.” As an example he offered the series of drawings of the “Life of Hippolytus” now pre- served in the Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, that Ligorio sent to his first patron, the Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este, in November 1569, after he moved to Ferrara to serve at the court of his last patron, the Duke Alfonso II d’Este, 1 Turin, Archivio di Stato, ms. J.a.II.15. See David Coffin, “Pirro Ligorio on the Nobility of the Arts,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964), 191–210. My warmest thanks to Blair Fowlkes Childs, Ann Massing, and Sarah Cox for their help in translating the present article. 2 John A. Gere, “Some Early Drawings by Pirro Ligorio,” Master Drawings 9, 3 (1971), 239–225 and 289–312. 3 Gere, “Some Early Drawings,” p. 239. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004385634_014 For use by the Author only | © 2019 Koninklijke Brill NV 274 Vagenheim nephew of the cardinal.4 The second series of drawings of Ligorio’s “full matu- rity” is that of the portraits of the princes of Este, produced around 1570 and now dispersed among several collections.5 In these drawings, we find indeed all the characteristics cited above: Hippolytus (Fig. 12.1) and Prince Bernard III (Fig. 12.2)6 are “stocky”; the mythological hero and the centaur have “rubbery” bodies (Fig. 12.1), and all the figures (Figs. 12.1 and 12.2) have “curled hair,” “large eyes”, and “prominent noses”.7 Then, Gere goes on to explain how he attributed to Ligorio the 29 drawings of his catalogue. He starts from the fact that Ligorio, like Taddeo Zuccaro, fol- lowed in the wake of Polidoro Caldara as a painter of facades,8 and therefore “the starting point for any investigation into the nature of his earliest style is a search among the mass of Polidoresque drawings”. This search revealed to Gere two coherent groups of drawings, the first of which, satisfactorily attributable to Taddeo, he published in his 1970 monograph.9 At first, Gere was tempted to consider the second group as attesting to another phase of Taddeo’s early style particularly because of a pair of figures on the verso of one of the drawing of the first group (Uffizi 6397F),10 corresponding exactly to a detail of a drawing belonging to the second group (Windsor Pl. 21).11 After further thought, how- ever, it seemed evident to Gere that the two groups were the work of two dis- tinct personalities. Furthermore, five of the twenty-five drawings of the second group were traditionally attributed to Ligorio; therefore, although they are not typical of his style, Gere considered these attributions a sufficient reason to assign the whole second group to Ligorio. The first drawing that Gere attributes to Ligorio depicts the “Dance of Salome” copied from the homonymous fresco painted by Ligorio in the 1540s in the Church of San Giovanni Decollato in Rome; it is the only extant evidence of 4 Ginette Vagenheim, “Les inscriptions ligoriennes. Remarques sur la tradition manuscrite,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, 30 (1987), 199–309. 5 See the checklist put together by David Robbins Coffin, Pirro Ligorio: the Renaissance art- ist, architect and antiquarian; with a checklist of drawings (University Park, Penn: 2004). 6 Oxford, Ashmolean Museum n. 274: “Albert and Bernard III, sons of Henry XVI”. It is nec- essary to specify that the Este family drawings were models prepared by another hand that Ligorio retouched, as I will show in a future article. 7 The drawing is New York, Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, Inv. 2006.22, fol. 7. 8 As testified by his first biographer Giovanni Baglione, Vite de’ pittori, scultori et architet- ti dal Pontificato di Gregorio XIII del 1572 in fino a’ tempi di Papa Urbano Ottavo nel 1642 (Rome: 1642). 9 J.A. Gere, Taddeo Zuccaro (Chicago: 1969), p. 34. 10 Gere, Taddeo Zuccaro, pl. 10. 11 Pl. refer to the plates in Gere’s article quoted above. Windsor Castle, Collection of H.M. Queen Elizabeth II, n. 245. For use by the Author only | © 2019 Koninklijke Brill NV In the Shadow of Polidoro da Caravaggio 275 Figure 12.1 Pirro Ligorio, Life of Hippolytus, 324 × 222 mm, pen and brown ink, with brown and gray wash, over black chalk, New York, Pierpont and Morgan Library and Museum, Inv. 2006.22, fol. 11r © Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum his activity as a painter.12 Although aware that this drawing, previously consid- ered anonymous, had nothing to do with Ligorio’s “mature style”, and that its characteristics are rather reminiscent of the style of Bagio Pupini or of Garofalo, Gere, nevertheless, attributes it to Ligorio for no other reason than being a copy 12 See Patrizia Tosini’s article in this volume. For use by the Author only | © 2019 Koninklijke Brill NV 276 Vagenheim Figure 12.2 Pirro Ligorio, Princes Albert and Bernard of Este, pen and brown wash over black chalk, 233 × 125 mm, Oxford, Ashmoleum Museum, Inv. 274 © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford For use by the Author only | © 2019 Koninklijke Brill NV In the Shadow of Polidoro da Caravaggio 277 of his fresco.13 Yet, it is obvious that in an article that aims to identify Ligorio’s drawings on the basis of his style, such a reason cannot supplant the criterion of style.