PIETRO PAOLO ROMANO
(active c. 1552–1570?)
A Heroic Bust of Ottavio Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza (1524–1586)
Bronze
84 cm. (33 in.) high
c. 1556
Signed P. PAV. ROM. F.
LITERATURE:
Benedetto Varchi, De Sonetti, Venezia 1555;
Giorgio Vasari: Le opere di Giorgio Vasari. Con nuove annotazioni e commenti di Gaetano Milanesi, Vol. I-VIII, Firenze 1878-1885;
Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Le Rime, Milano 1587;
Georg Habich, Die Medaillen der italienischen Renaissance, Stuttart/Berlin 1924
Alfred Armand, Les medailleurs italiens, vols. I-III, Paris 1883-87;
Orazio Bacci (ed.), Vita di Benvenuto Cellini. Testo critico con introduzione e note storiche, Firenze 1901;
Giovanni Drei, I Farnese. Grandezza e decadenza di una dinastia italiana, Roma 1954;
Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Scritti sulle Arti. Introduzione e commento a cura di Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Firenze 1973-74;
Cesare Johnson, Cosimo I de’ Medici e la sua “storia metallica” nelle medaglie di Pietro Paolo Galeotti, in Medaglia 12, 1976, pp. 15-46;
Sotheby’s Sale, Important Mobilier et Objects d’Art, Montecarlo May 26-7, 1980, lot. 1154;
J. Graham Pollard, Medaglie italiane del Rinascimento nel Museo Nazionale del Bargello, vol. II, Firenze 1985;
Bertrand Jestaz, Copies d’antiques au Palais Farnèse. Les fontes de Guglielmo della Porta, in Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome 105, 1993, pp. 7-48;
The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance, ed. Stephen K. Scher, New York 1994;
Mario Scalini, Cellini, Firenze 1995, p.41, ill. 55.;
Sotheby’s Sale, New York January 10, 1995: The Cyril Humphris Collection of European Sculpture and works of Art, Part I, lot 21;
Fernanda Capobianco, in: Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte. La Collezione Farnese. Vol. 3: Le arti decorative, Napoli 1996, pp. 33-37;
Marco Ruffini, Galeotti, Pietro Paolo, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Vol. 51, Roma 1998, pp. 435-437;
Philip Attwood, Italian medals c. 1530 - 1600 in British Public Collections, London 2002;
Alan Chong, in Raphael, Cellini & a Renaissance Banker. The Patronage of Bindo Altoviti. Edited by Alan Chong, Donatella Pegazzano, Dimitrios Zikos, Boston 2003;
Laura Traversi, La ritrattistica di Margherita d’Austria (1522-1586) tra pittura, medaglistica e stampa (II), in Margherita d’Austria (1522-1586). Costruzioni politiche e diplomazia, tra corte Farnese e Monarchia spagnola. A cura di Silvia Mantini, Roma 2003, pp. 281-326;
Christiana Riebesell in Tiziano e il ritratto da raffaello ai carracci, exh.cat. Naples 2006, C75, pp. 318-319
EXHIBITED:
Naples 2006, Tiziano e il ritratto da raffaello ai carracci Museo di Capodimonte 25th March-4th June 2006
The powerful head and distinctive features of Ottavio Farnese, his veined brow with a single wart in the centre, aquiline nose, curling moustaches, tufted beard, well defined facial hair around the jaw and strong veined neck, characterise this over-life-size bronze bust. The slightly raised right eyebrow underlines the sitter’s confident, piercing gaze and proud demeanour. The angle of the head and the size of the bust indicate that it would have been placed above eye-level and slightly tilted forward, thus looking down at and conveying an overpowering impression on the viewer. This is a portrait of a warrior ruler who demands obedience and respect from his subjects.
The shoulders are draped with a fringed toga fastened on the right shoulder with a clasp in the form of a lion head. The signature P. PAV. ROM. F is cast into the reverse of the bronze at the top of the truncation.
There are traces of six fixing points and the remains of an iron fixing peg on the reverse, which is modelled in an almost circular form suggesting that it was intended to be set in an architectural niche.
The bust has recently undergone cleaning and conservation by Giovanni Morigi who carried out similar work on the Cellini bronze portrait busts of Bindo Altoviti and Cosimo de’ Medici prior to the exhibition ‘Raphael, Cellini, & A Renaissance Banker’ at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the Bargello in Florence. The toga of the present bust and parts of the flesh were covered with a thick green later patina that has been successfully removed leaving its much more sympathetic original surface intact. The details of the modelling of the drapery and the facial features are now much more evident. Careful examination of the bronze has revealed the artist’s fingerprints in one or two passages.
The facial features of the present bust confirm the identification of the sitter as Ottavio Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza (1524-1586). Titian’s portrait of Pope Paul III and his grandsons Ottavio and Alessandro (1545-46) shows Ottavio at the age of twenty-three. He is depicted beardless, but with the same aquiline nose and short cropped hair. The distinctively hooked nose is also a prominent feature of the portraits of Ottavio in Taddeo Zuccaro’s frescos at Caprarola (1562-63; scenes of the Restitution of Parma to Ottavio and of the Marriage of Ottavio Farnese and Margaret of Austria). A sixteenth-century engraving of Ottavio on horseback by Cristofano Bertelli shows an even closer resemblance to this portrait bust. Portrait medals, such as the one of Ottavio and his wife Margaret of Austria in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna , are further indications of the sitter’s identity. The toga clasp with its lion head is a motif used often by Ottavio to symbolise his links to Hercules, who in turn was promoted in the Farnese iconography as the progenitor of the family.
Ottavio Farnese was born in 1524 to Pier Luigi Farnese (1503-1547), the first Duke of Parma and Piacenza, and Girolama Orsini from Pitigliano. Ottavio was the younger brother of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520-1589) and the grandson of Pope Paul III (b. 1468, elected 1534, d.1549). In 1538 Ottavio was married by his grandfather to Margaret of Austria (1511-1586), widow of Alessandro de’ Medici and illegitimate daughter of the Emperor Charles V.
Pier Luigi Farnese was assassinated in 1547 in a conspiracy led by Ferrante Gonzaga, probably with the knowledge of Charles V. Ottavio, expecting to succeed his father as the Duke of Parma and Piacenza, was to his extreme disappointment deprived of this inheritance by his grandfather Paul III and his father-in-law Charles V. Ottavio occupied the city of Parma, but Paul III reclaimed the territories for the papacy, while Piacenza was lost to the imperial troops. With the help of his brother Alessandro, Ottavio placed the already ailing Pope under severe and perhaps lethal pressure. In 1549 Paul III, already on his deathbed, signed a decree handing Parma back to Ottavio, but this was not to be the end of Ottavio’s struggle to obtain his inheritance. The incoming Pope Julius III, after initially confirming his predecessor’s decision, also dispossessed Ottavio. After a period of turbulence and the abdication of Charles V, it was finally the Emperor’s son and Ottavio’s brother-in-law, Philip II, who guaranteed Ottavio’s right to the duchy of Parma and Piacenza by signing the Treaty of Ghent on 15 September 1556.
As a consequence of this agreement, Ottavio was obliged to accept a Spanish military presence in his duchy and to send his son Alessandro to the Spanish court to be educated and to act as a hostage. Alessandro, before eventually succeeding his father as Duke of Parma and Piacenza, was to become the most successful general in the service of Philip II.
Ottavio’s wife Margaret was appointed Regent of the Netherlands in 1559 by her stepbrother Philip II. She sponsored a number of Netherlandish artists who came to work in Italy. Ottavio was also a patron of the arts, and it is documented that he commissioned several important bronze sculptures from Giambologna. At times, painters and sculptors worked for Ottavio and his brother Cardinal Alessandro simultaneously. The exploits of Cardinal Alessandro as a patron and collector have tended to overshadow the real achievements of Ottavio in this domain. Unfortunately there is still no biography that does justice to his life and work.
In comparing Ottavio’s image in the present bronze bust and in the triple portrait by Titian of 1545-46, Ottavio is no longer the beardless, inexperienced young man inclining before the power and seniority of his grandfather and his older brother; he is now the confident and strong-willed ruler who in the process of becoming Duke of Parma and Piacenza has defeated two popes and an emperor.
The year 1556, when the Treaty of Ghent finally confirmed Ottavio’s right to the duchy, would be an appropriate date for the bust. At the time of the Treaty, Ottavio, born on 9 October 1524, was almost thirty-two years old and the maturity of his features in the present bronze bust compares closely with other likenesses of him at around this age.
The bust is signed P. PAV. ROM. F, i.e. ‘Petrus Paulus Romanus fecit’, on the reverse of the shoulders. The signature is that of the sculptor and medallist Pietro Paolo Romano. Until very recently this artist had been confused with two other artists of similar name: Paolo Romano who worked for many years as assistant to Cellini, accompanied him to France and remained there after his master’s departure for Florence in 1541, and Pietro Paolo Romano Galeotti, a goldsmith and medallist who worked for Cosimo I de’ Medici and also at different times for Cellini. The confusion of the three artists began in the early twentieth century with Thieme-Becker and has been perpetuated by every authority writing since then on Cellini and the medallists of the sixteenth century. We are indebted to Dimitrios Zikos for helping us to clarify this confusion.
Pietro Paolo Romano who cast and signed the bust of Ottavio appears to have worked mainly in Milan and Genoa for the Habsburg and the Spanish court. Of the forty-six medals signed PPR and catalogued by Armand and Attwood, twenty-eight are of sitters who have a link with Charles V and the Spanish court and a further five are linked to Ottavio Farnese and his wife Margaret of Austria.
Due to the confusion described above, Pietro Paolo Romano has never been studied as a sculptor in his own right. Our knowledge of his activity is limited to his signed medals that can be dated between 1552 and 1570(?) and the references to him by the Milanese writer, painter and theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538-1600) of whom Romano made a medal and who celebrated a medal by Romano in a sonnet.
Of the very few over-life-size busts in bronze that have survived from the sixteenth century the most notable is Cellini’s portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici with which the Ottavio bust has much in common. The grandeur of the conception and the modelling of the Ottavio bust suggest the influence of Cellini. Both portrait busts have as their purpose to portray a bold, larger-than-life warrior-ruler instilling fear in his enemies and obedience and respect in his subjects. The fringed drapery is common to both busts and the lion-head clasp on the toga of Ottavio echoes the larger lion head on the shoulder of the Cosimo bust. The inclination of the turning head to give the sitter liveliness and movement is also identical in both busts.
It is interesting to note the use of the ‘F’ for ‘fecit’ following Romano’s signature; this is often used by the artist casting the bust from a more senior artist’s model, as in the case of Giambologna and his assistant Antonio Susini. When an artist wishes to make clear that a work is his conception then ‘INV’ for ‘invenit’ is often used.
Eugène Plon, the nineteenth-century biographer of Cellini, illustrates a drawing in the collection of the Marquis de Chennevières that is a project for a bust ‘all’antica’ of a member of the Farnese family. Plon suggests that this may have been a project that Cellini was preparing for Ottavio Farnese.
At this early stage in our knowledge of the life and work of Pietro Paulo Romano it is not possible to point to any direct connection between him and Cellini or to offer evidence that he was working from a model conceived by the Florentine master, but the obvious similarities between the Ottavio and Cosimo busts make it a distinct possibility.
1 On the Pope’s political intriguing to secure Margaret for Ottavio see Lefevre, Renato, Richerche su ‘Madama’. Margarita d’Austria e l’Italia del ’500, Castelmadama 1980, p19-21.
2 Nasalli Rocca, Emilio, I Farnese, Milan 1969, p82; Gamrath, Helge, ‘The History of a Success in the Italian Renaissance: The Farnese Family c. 1400-1600’, in: Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, 24, 1997 (1998), p97.
3 Goldsmith Phillips, John & Olga Raggio, ‘Ottavio Farnese’, in: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, XII, New York 1954, p233; Nasalli Rocca 1969, p83; Arcangeli, Letizia, ‘Atlante genealogico della famiglia Farnese’, in: Fornari Schianchi, Lucia & Nicola Spinosa, I Farnese. Arte e collezionismo, exh. cat., Parma/Naples/Munich 1995, p37.
4 Nasalli Rocca 1969, p84.
5 Nasalli Rocca 1969, p84f; Diane De Grazia, ‘Ottavio Farnese and his Artists in Parma and Rome’, in: Il luogo ed il ruolo della città di Bologna tra Europa continentale e mediterranea, Bologna 1992, p267.
6 Nasalli Rocca 1969, p117; Del Vecchio, Edoardo, I Farnese, Rome 1972, p62.
7 Nasalli Rocca 1969, p98; Dumont, Georges-Henri, Marguerite de Parme, bâtarde de Charles Quint (1522-1586), Brussels 1999, p136.
8 Meijer, Bert W., Parma e Bruxelles. Committenza e collezionismo farnesiani alle due corti, Parma 1988, p15; Robertson, Clare, ‘Il Gran Cardinale’. Alessandro Farnese, Patron of the Arts, New Haven/London 1992, p240.
9 Avery, Charles & Anthony Radcliffe, Giambologna 1529-1608, Sculptor to the Medici, exh. cat., London 1978, p15 and cat. 56 (Rape of a Sabine); Meijer 1988, p49.
10 The role of Ottavio Farnese as a patron of the arts has not yet been analysed to its whole extent. One of the most relevant contributions to the subject is Diane De Grazia’s article ‘Ottavio Farnese and his artists in Parma and Rome’, in: Il luogo ed il ruolo della città di Bologna tra Europa continentale e mediterranea, Bologna 1992, pp265-277, esp. p268ff.
11 Nasalli Rocca 1969, p79.
12 Pietro Paolo Romano was desribed as a statuaro. We are indebted to Dimitrios Zikos for this reference.
13 Armand, Forrer and Babelon did not yet make the connection with Cellini’s assistant, but thought Pietro Paolo Romano was Galeotti. See Armand, Alfred, Les médailleurs italiens des quinzième et seizième siècle, Paris 1883, vol. I, p227; Forrer, Ludwig, Biographical Dictionary of Medallists, London 1904, vol. II, p190; Babelon, Jean, La médaille et les médailleurs, Paris 1927, p69. For the erroneous assumption that Galeotti, Pietro Paolo Romano and Cellini’s assistant were one and the same person see Thieme, Ulrich & Felix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Leipzig 1907ff, vol XIII, p91f; The Salton Collection. Renaissance & Baroque Medals & Plaquettes, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick/Maine 1965, before no. 41; Hill, George F. and J. Graham Pollard, Renaissance Medals. Complete Catalogue of the Samuel H. Kress Collection, London 1967, p65; Scher, Stephen K. (ed.), The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance, exh. cat., New York 1994, p164f; Turner, Jane (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, London 1996, vol. 12, p3f; Börner, Lore, Die italienischen Medailllen der Renaissance und des Barock (1450 bis 1750), Berlin 1997, p153f; Attwood, Philip, Italian Medals c. 1530-1600 in British Public Collections, London 2003, vol I, p347ff.
14 Medal of Cardinal Madruzzo, see Attwood 2003, cat. 830.
15 Medal of Antonio Calmone, see Attwood 2003, cat. 868.
16 See Armand 1883, vol. I, p230, no. 15.
17 Plon, Eugène, Benvenuto Cellini, orfèvre, médailleur, sculpteur, Paris 1883, p368, pl LXXVI.
