ANTONIANUM: V. ISTITUTI DI STUDI SUPERIOR
I. ANTONIAZZO ROMANO
Painter, born in Rome, died there after 1508. His training took place in contact with the Umbrian and Tuscan painters summoned to Rome by papal patronage. Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, Benozzo Gozzoli, il Pinturicchio, and above all Melozzo da Forlì fundamentally shaped A.’s manner. Although criticism has not yet fully clarified his personality, A. is of considerable importance for having determined the Roman pictorial milieu of the fifteenth century, since he assimilated and translated the Roman tradition into composedly solemn forms, making it an element of style that he passed on to his numerous workshop. This workshop, operating extensively in Lazio and the neighboring Umbrian lands, produced stylistically discontinuous works, but was uniformly characterized by its master’s aspiration to monumentality. The attribution of many of the numerous works that bear his name is uncertain. Among those few that are signed, the oldest that has come down to us is the Triptych in the Quadreria civica of Rieti, dated 1464, in which a certain imbalance between the central group, adhering through the harshness of its line and the separation of its planes to the manner of Gozzoli, and the twoside panels, executed more freely, suggests two phases of execution. Greater command of the compositional structure is evident in the triptych of Subiaco, signed and dated 1467, in which the simplification of the expressive means favors the achievement of volume. Perhaps A., under the mediated or direct influence of Piero della Francesca, was already conscious of the need for geometric rigor, which he expressed in the slightly later frescoes (c. 1470) of S. Maria della Consolazione in Rome, whose fragments have recently been rediscovered in situ. Around 1480 A. collaborated with Melozzo da Forlì on the decoration of the Vatican Library, and became its
Tesque. The cycle of frescoes in the oratory of S. Giovanni Evangelista in Tivoli also belongs within the sphere of A.’s school. Of the paintings executed by A. with his workers in the Castle of Bracciano (1491), which he himself mentions in a letter to Prince Virginio Orsini, nothing has survived free from restoration. — Vedi Tav. CXXI.