SEBASTIANO del PIOMBO. - S. Luciani, known as S. del P., painter, was probably born in Venice around 1485 and died in Rome on June 21, 1547.
The misreading of an inscription on the *Pietà* formerly in the Layard collection, now in the National Gallery in London, led to the belief that this painting and a few others with similar characteristics were early works by him; it was therefore supposed that he had first trained in the workshop of Cima. This supposition has been abandoned now that it has been recognized that the painting does not belong to him. His early 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 clearly in the tradition of Giorgione, with a tendency to emphasize formal values that may have been nurtured by the presence in Venice of Fra Bartolomeo in 1508. In 1511 he was brought to Rome by Agostino Chigi, for whom he frescoed lunettes in a loggia of the Farnesina with scenes from Ovid’s *Metamorphoses*. These works are still entirely Venetian in character; but soon afterward his ties with the Roman artistic world become evident. A refined reflection of this is seen in a large group of portraits: the so-called *Fornarina* in the Uffizi (1512); the *Portrait of Cardinal Ferry Carondelet* in the Thyssen Collection in Lugano; that of *Cardinal Ciocchi del Monte* in Dublin; and so on; and at the same time it is clear that S. influenced the new Venetian coloristic vision of the Urbino school.
But more lively and decisive were his relations with Michelangelo, seen in the *Deposition* in the Hermitage (1516), where the landscape and tonal atmosphere are still Venetian. The masses, violently dislocated, have a marked plastic determination; in a masterpiece slightly later, the *Pietà* of Viterbo, the contrast between his fundamental Venetian training and Michelangelesque influence is even more intense. So intense that it may be supposed that Michelangelo had a hand in it, if not by providing the cartoon, as Vasari would have it, at least by suggesting the dramatic nudity of the composition. The correspondence between S. and Michelangelo also bears witness to their artistic relations, which were also fueled by bitter rivalry with Raphael; in competition with whom S. painted the *Raising of Lazarus* for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (now in the National Gallery in London), exhibited in the Vatican in 1519. To these years also belong the paintings in the chapel in S. Pietro in Montorio (commissioned in 1516 and completed, after long delays, in 1524) and the *Visitation* in the Louvre. Immediately after Raphael’s death he began the altarpiece with the *Nativity of the Virgin* in S. Maria del Popolo, another very important stage in the beginning of S.’s Mannerist phase, where he still attempts a cultural solution to the meeting of two opposing 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* in Viterbo, he painted almost exclusively portraits, executed in a monumental mode (*Bareheaded Pope Clement VII* in the National Museum in Naples; *Andrea Doria* in the Doria Collection in Rome; *Pope Clement VII* in the Pinacoteca in Parma, ca. 1530, etc.) and variations on the theme of the *Ecce Homo* (Madrid, Prado; Budapest, Andrassy Collection; Leningrad, Hermitage, 1537), reworking an iconographic type that would be taken up in the devotional art of Morales. He left Rome only for a brief visit to Venice in 1526, where in 1531 he was appointed to the office of the Papal Lead Foundry (whence his nickname); after which, according to Vasari, he devoted little and unwilling attention to painting. Of works between 1539 and 1547, the year of his death, only an *Ecce Homo* in the convent of S. José in Avila, dated 1544, is attributed to him. - See pl. XIII.