Sebastiano del Piombo
Sebastiano del Piombo was an Italian painter of the High Renaissance and early Mannerist periods, famous as the only major artist of the period to combine the colouring of the Venetian school in which he was trained with the monumental forms of the Roman school. He belongs both to the painting school of his native city, Venice, where he made significant contributions before he left for Rome in 1511, and that of Rome, where he stayed for the rest of his life, and whose style he thoroughly adopted.
Born Sebastiano Luciani, after coming to Rome he became known as Sebastiano Veneziano or Viniziano, until in 1531 he became the Keeper of the Seal to the Papacy, and so got the nickname del Piombo thereafter, from his new job title of piombatore. Friends like Michelangelo and Ariosto called him Fra Bastiano.
Never a very disciplined or productive painter, his artistic productivity fell still further after becoming piombatore, which committed him to attend on the pope most days, to travel with him and to take holy orders as a friar, despite having a wife and two children. He now painted mostly portraits, and relatively few works of his survive compared to his great contemporaries in Rome. This limited his involvement with the Mannerist style of his later years.
Having achieved success as a lutenist in Venice when young, he turned to painting and trained with Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione. When he first went to Rome, he worked alongside Raphael and then became one of the few painters to get on well with Michelangelo, who tried to promote his career by encouraging him to compete for commissions against Raphael. He painted portraits and religious subjects in oils, and, once he was established, avoided the large fresco schemes that took up so much of the time of Raphael and Michelangelo. His earlier career in both Venice and Rome was somewhat overshadowed by the presence of clearly greater painters in the same city, but after the death of Raphael in 1520, he became Rome's leading painter. His influence on other artists was limited by his lack of prominent pupils and relatively little dissemination of his works in print copies.
Venice
Sebastiano del Piombo was probably born in Venice, though there is no certainty as to his background. His birthdate is extrapolated from Vasari's statement that he was 62 at his death in 1547. That he was first known as a musician and singer may suggest an upper-middle-class background; the extent to which his playing on the lute and other instruments was professional is unclear. Like his contemporary Raphael, his career was marked by his ability to get on well with both other artists and patrons. He began to train as a painter at a relatively late age, probably 18 or 20, so around 1503–1505, becoming a pupil of Giovanni Bellini and probably afterwards of Giorgione, both of whose influence is apparent in his works; Vasari's mention of their relationship is rather vague: "si acconciò con Giorgione".No signed or firmly documented works survive from his period painting in Venice, and many attributions are disputed. As with other artists, some of Sebastiano's works have long been confused with Giorgione's. Like Titian, he may have completed work left unfinished at Giorgione's death in 1510; Marcantonio Michiel says he finished The Three Philosophers. The earliest significant work attributed to him is a portrait of a girl in Budapest, of about 1505.
He is now usually assigned the unfinished and reworked Judgement of Solomon now at Kingston Lacy. This dramatic and imposing picture, "one of the masterpieces of Venetian narrative painting", was also long attributed to Giorgione; it may have been abandoned about 1508, though the estimated dates vary in the period 1505–1510. After extensive restoration in the 1980s, removing later overpainting, the painting is now left with traces of the three different compositions visible; still more can be seen with infra-red reflectography. Still over 2 × 3 metres, it seems originally to have been even larger, with some 40 cm lost along the left edge. There are two versions of the elaborate architectural background, which was a recurrent interest of Sebastiano's Venetian period. The last setting is in a basilica, which may reflect a "more learned" picture intended for a building holding courts of justice. The figure at the front of the executioner, left without clothes or the baby, is clearly drawn from classical sculpture.
Four standing figures of saints in niches on the organ-shutters of San Bartolomeo, Venice, now in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, date from –1509, and are "very Giorgionesque", especially the pair on the insides. They were painted at the same time as Giorgione's frescos for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi just by the church, which was the German's church in Venice, and at this time also held Albrecht Dürer's Madonna of the Rose-Garlands of 1506. The outside pair of shutters also show what Sebastiano had learnt from Bellini. Their technique has developed "from the earlier smooth surface to the application of paint in heavy brushstrokes", and the figure of Saint Sebastian shows awareness of classical sculpture.
The main altarpiece for San Giovanni Crisostomo, Venice of 1510–1511 shows the patron saint, Saint John Chrysostom reading aloud at a desk, a Mary Magdalene looking out at the viewer, and two other female and three male saints. The organ-shutters for the church were also painted. The style shows developments "towards a new fullness of form and breadth of movement" that may have been influenced by the Florentine painter Fra Bartolommeo, who was in Venice in 1508. Aspects of the composition were also innovative, and later copied by Venetian painters, including even Titian.
Rome
1511–1520
In 1511 the Papal banker Agostino Chigi was the richest man in Rome, and a generous patron of the arts. Early in the year he was sent to Venice by Pope Julius II to buy Venetian support for the papacy in the War of the League of Cambrai. When he returned to Rome after a stay of some six months, he brought Sebastiano with him; Sebastiano was to remain based in Rome for the rest of his life. Sebastiano began by painting mythological subjects in lunettes in the Sala di Galatea in Chigi's Villa Farnesina, under a ceiling just done by Baldassarre Peruzzi. In these he already shows an adaption to Roman style, especially that of Michelangelo, whose Sistine Chapel ceiling had just been completed. Probably the next year, he added a large Polyphemus. It is possible that Raphael's famous Galatea of 1514, which is in the next bay and now dominates the room, replaced a fresco by Sebastiano. A larger cycle on the lower walls was apparently intended, but abandoned, for reasons that are not clear.File:Sebastiano del Piombo - Morte di Adone - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|Death of Adonis, Uffizi, c. 1512–13
Sebastiano had also been producing easel paintings from soon after his arrival, showing the development of his new style. A Death of Adonis in the Uffizi dates to about 1512–13, and shows that he "had achieved a working dialectic of Roman and Venetian classical styles", in which he "enlarged the proportion of his figures into an almost bulking massiveness, ponderous and sensuously splendid: idealizations, but of sensuous existence".
By about 1515, Sebastiano had befriended and allied himself with Michelangelo, who recruited him "as a kind of deputy for him in painting", he having returned to his backlog of promised projects in sculpture. Michelangelo's intention was for Sebastiano to "contest Raphael's first place" in painting in Rome, using at least in part ideas and designs supplied by Michelangelo, whose rivalry with Raphael had become intense. The intention may have been for a closer relationship than actually resulted, as in 1516 Michelangelo returned to Florence, only returning occasionally to Rome for several years after.
The first result of this collaboration was one of Sebastiano's most important paintings, a Pietà in Viterbo. Here the composition is highly unusual for this common subject, with Christ lying across the bottom of the picture space, at the feet of a Virgin looking up to Heaven, so that the two figures do not actually touch. Though no drawing survives, this was Michelangelo's conception, where "an idea of high tragic power is expressed with extreme simplicity in a structure of severe geometric rigour". The back of the panels have large sketches in charcoal that seem to be by both artists. In 1516 he painted a similar subject, the Lamentation of Jesus using his own composition, and showing his awareness of Raphael's handling of groups of figures.
These led a Florentine friend of Michelangelo, Pierfrancesco Borgherini, to commission Sebastiano to decorate a chapel in San Pietro in Montorio in Rome; he no doubt hoped to get significant input from Michelangelo. There is a Michelangelo drawing of 1516 for the Flagellation of Jesus in the British Museum, and other sketches; the final design survives only in a copy by Giulio Clovio after another Michelangelo drawing. In the event there were a series of interruptions and Sebastiano did not complete the chapel until early 1524. The Flagellation is painted in oil on plaster. This was a method first practiced by Domenico Veneziano, and afterwards by other artists; but according to Vasari only Sebastiano succeeded in preventing the colours eventually blackening.
The last major work of the period was the Raising of Lazarus, now in the National Gallery, London, which was commissioned in 1516 by Cardinal Giulio de Medici, archbishop of Narbonne in southern France, and the future Pope Clement VII, in blatant competition, engineered by Michelangelo, with a painting of the same size by Raphael, the Transfiguration. Both were supposed to hang in Narbonne Cathedral. Michelangelo supplied at least drawings for the figure of Lazarus and the two men supporting him, but probably did not do any work on the painting itself, if only because he was only briefly in Rome during the time it was painted. When the two paintings were hung together in the Vatican, just after Raphael's death in 1520, both were praised, but the Raphael generally preferred, as has remained the case ever since.
In the early 1520s Sebastiano completed the Borgherini Chapel with a Transfiguration in the semi-dome above his Flagellation. The combination shows the influence of the Apocalipsis Nova, a contemporary text that prophesied the coming of an "Angelic Pastor" who would bring a new age of peace. Michelangelo was among many reformist Catholics interested in the text. The Flagellation represents "the current, corrupted state of Christianity and the Transfiguration the glorious future to come".