SEBASTIANO del PIOMBO. — S. Luciani, called S. del P., painter, born probably in Venice around 1485, died in Rome on 21 June 1547.
The erroneous reading of an inscription on the Pietà formerly in the Layard collection, now in the National Gallery in London, led this painting and several others that, like it, display Cimesque characteristics to be regarded as youthful works by him; it was therefore conjectured that his initial training had taken place in Cima’s workshop. This supposition has now been abandoned, since it has been recognized that the painting does not belong to him. The youthful works painted in Venice (the organ shutters of S. Bartolomeo, datable to around 1508, and the altarpiece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, slightly later) show him to be frankly Giorgionesque, with a tendency to emphasize formal values that was perhaps fostered by fra Bartolomeo’s presence in Venice in 1508. In 1511 he was brought to Rome by Agostino Chigi, for whom he frescoed in a loggia of the Farnesina the lunettes with scenes taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These works are still entirely Venetian; but immediately afterward his relations with the Roman artistic world become evident. A Raphael-like reflection appears in a large group of portraits: the so-called Fornarina in the Uffizi, from 1512; the Portrait of Cardinal Ferry Carondelet in the Thyssen Collection in Lugano; that of Cardinal Ciocchi del Monte, in Dublin; etc.; and at the same time S.’s influence on the Urbinate’s new Venetian coloristic vision is apparent.
But more vital and decisive are his relations with Michelangelo, in the Deposition of the Hermitage (1516), where the landscape and tonal atmosphere are still Venetian. The masses, violently displaced, possess pronounced plastic definition; in a masterpiece painted somewhat later, the Pietà of Viterbo, the contrast between his fundamental Venetian training and Michelangelo’s influence is even more intense. So intense, indeed, that one may suppose Michelangelo to have had a part in it, if not by providing the cartoon, as Vasari would have it, at least by suggesting the scheme’s dramatic nudity. The correspondence between S. and Michelangelo likewise testifies to their artistic relationship, also nourished by the atmosphere of rivalry with Raphael; in competition with him, S. painted the Resurrection of Lazarus for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (now in the National Gallery in London), exhibited in the Vatican in 1519. The paintings in the chapel of S. Pietro in Montorio (commissioned from him in 1516 and completed, after lengthy interruptions, in 1524) and the Visitation in the Louvre also belong to these years. Immediately after Raphael’s death he began the altarpiece with the Nativity of the Virgin in
S. Maria del Popolo, another highly important stage in S.’s Mannerist development, in which an attempt is still made to achieve a cultural solution to the encounter between two opposed figurative visions. This work occupied many years of his life (it was completed after his death by Salviati, in 1554) and is his last large-scale composition.
After 1525, the date of the Flagellation of Viterbo, he painted almost exclusively portraits, conceived according to a monumental formula (the beardless Clement VII, in the National Museum of Naples; Andrea Doria, in the Doria Collection in Rome; Clement VII, in the Pinacoteca of Parma, around 1530; etc.) and variations on the theme of the Christ Carrying the Cross (Madrid, Prado; Budapest, Andrassy Collection; Leningrad, Hermitage, from 1537), reworking an iconographic type that would be adopted in Morales’s devotional art. Only for a brief trip to Venice, in 1526, did he leave Rome, where in 1531 he received the office of the Papal Sealing Office (whence his nickname); after this, according to Vasari, he devoted little time and enthusiasm to painting. Of works from between 1539 and 1547, the year of his death, only a Christ Carrying the Cross in the convent of S. José in Avila, dated 1544, is attributed to him. — Vedi tav. XIII.