Beyond Disegno: Professional Identity and Material Experimentation in mid 16th-century Italian Portraiture

Venue: Theatre C (124), Old Arts

Presenters: Dr Elena Calvillo

By 1531, the Venetian artist Sebastiano del Piombo had resettled in Rome after the Sack, received a lucrative sinecure as the keeper of the papal seals and won acclaim for his method of painting in oils on stone supports. Two decades later, Agnolo Bronzino produced a series of portraits on tin supports while working for Cosimo I de' Medici. This lecture examines the ways in which their innovative use of materials in portraiture contributed to both the painters' and patrons' identities, and how it made claims of originality and invention that might otherwise be denied to artists who excelled in the portrait genre.

Dr Elena Calvillo is Associate Professor of Art History, University of Richmond. Her research and writing focus on artistic service and imitative strategies in 16th-century Italy, Spain and Portugal.

Image: Sebastiano del Piombo. Portrait of Pope Clement VII. c. 1531. Oil on slate. Naples, Museo di Capodimonte (Photo Scala)

from
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/9214-beyond-disegno-professional-identity-and-material-experimentation-in-mid-16th-century