ANTONIANUM: V. ISTITUTI DI STUDI SUPÉ-RIORI.
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, 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 Quattrocento pictorial environment, since he assimilated and translated into composedly solemn forms the Roman tradition, making it a stylistic element that he transmitted to his large workshop. This workshop, operating extensively in Lazio and the neighboring Umbrian regions, produced stylistically discontinuous works, but was uniformly characterized by its master’s intent toward monumentality.
The attribution of many of the numerous works that go under his name remains uncertain. Among the few signed works, the earliest to survive is the Triptych in the Civic Picture Gallery of Rieti, dated 1464, in which a certain imbalance between the central group—adhering in its harshness of line and separation of planes to Gozzoli’s manner—and the two side panels of freer execution suggests two phases of work. Greater mastery in the arrangement of the composition is evident in the triptych of Subiaco, signed and dated 1467, in which the simplification of expressive means favors the achievement of volume. Perhaps under the mediated or direct influence of Piero della Francesca, A. already felt the need for geometric rigor, which he expressed in the frescoes shortly thereafter (c. 1470) in S. Maria della Consolazione in Rome, fragments of which have recently been rediscovered *in situ*.
Around 1480, A. collaborated with Melozzo da Forlì in the decoration of the Vatican Library, and in this context he painted the fresco of Christ in Majesty in the apse of S. Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome.
Within the circle of A.’s school is also the cycle of frescoes in the oratory of S. Giovanni Evangelista in Tivoli. Of the paintings executed by A. with his workshop in the Castello di Bracciano (1491), mentioned by him in a letter to Prince Virginio Orsini, nothing remains unaltered by restorations. — See Plate CXXI.