Pirro Ligorio

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Introduction

There has never been an extensive or even adequate biography of the sixteenth-century Neapolitan artist and antiquarian Pirro Ligorio. His contemporary the Tuscan artist and biographer of Italian artists, Giorgio Vasari, refused to include an account of Ligorio in his Vite. Vasari, as an ardent follower and worshiper of the artist Michelangelo, accused Ligorio of belittling Michelangelo and was in vicious competition with Ligorio to be accepted as a papal artist. Presumably these are the reasons Vasari omitted Ligorio.

The first biographical account of Ligorio is the two pages Giovanni Baglione published in his Vite in 1642, about sixty years after Ligorio’s death. Baglione’s sketch presents, with no apparent errors, a very reasonable image of the variety of accomplishments Ligorio achieved. Ligorio’s contribution to house facade painting in Rome is particularly stressed. A few of Baglione’s contributions to Ligorio’s life are unconfirmed, and their source is unknown. Baglione is the first to claim that it was Ligorio’s ability as an engineer that caused Duke Alfonso II to call him to Ferrara to control the damage produced by the silting up of the Po River. Ligorio is described as "of tall stature and good appearance," and his death is credited to a fall, information for which there seems to be no other source. Later biographical accounts, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Francesco Milizia’s Memorie degli architetti antiche e moderne or G. K. Nagler’s Künstler-Lexikon, are for the most part based on Baglione, although they introduce numerous errors, which Baglione did not have. So Milizia ascribes to Pius IV, not Pius V, the commission for the tomb of Paul IV, and Nagler locates the tomb in San Pietro in Vaticano, not in Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Milizia claims that it was Paul IV who removed Ligorio as the architect of San Pietro, while Nagler credits Duke Ercole II with calling Ligorio to Ferrara.

The first scholarly account of Ligorio’s life is the entry by Giuseppe Ceci in the Thieme-Becker Künstler-Lexicon of 1929, which is based on thorough research but is the last biographical account to consider all aspects of Ligorio’s career. Contemporary with Ceci’s account, Vincenzo Pacifici published his life of the Cardinal of Ferrara, which explored the relationship between Ligorio and the cardinal. There were also important studies of individual works of architecture produced by Ligorio, such as F. S. Seni’s La Villa d’Este in Tivoli in 1902, Walter Friedländer’s Das Kasino Pius des Vierten in 1912, followed after World War II by James Ackerman’s The Cortile del Belvedere in 1954 and my Villa d’Este at Tivoli of 1960, which had been part of an unpublished dissertation of 1954. The dissertation included an intensive biography of Ligorio. which is the genesis of the present study.

My interest in the personality and activity of Ligorio began in 1945 in the seminar of Erwin Panofsky on Renaissance and Renascences. The seminar was to center on several characteristics of the period usually defined as the Renaissance, such as linear perspective, central-plan churches, and classicism. Panofsky differentiated the Renaissance from the medieval Carolingian Renascence or the Twelfth-Century Renascence by the fact that the Renaissance reintegrated classic stories or iconography with forms as seen in classical antiquity, unlike the Renascences, which presented the story and the forms as separate entities. Thus, he chose the subject of the work of Ligorio for a student report to illustrate the Renaissance approach.

For Ligorio, the ideal model for contemporary society was classical antiquity, particularly Roman antiquity. Ligorio, like his humanistic predecessors, such as Leon Battista Alberti, considered a study of classical ideals and forms necessary to correct the defects he saw in contemporary society and culture. Therefore, imperfect or fragmentary classical remains must be restored. Ancient sculpture should not be exhibited with missing noses, fingers, or limbs but must be restored by stonecutters after his direction, so that contemporary artists would have proper examples on which to base their work. Similarly, he would restore fragmentary inscriptions so that their facts or information could be understood by his contemporaries and not left simply as ruined ancient artifacts. He was exacting in his analysis of ancient monuments. One of his criticisms of Michelangelo was the freedom with which the latter used ancient motifs. For Ligorio broken pediments denoted death and so were appropriate only on tombs, unlike the free use that Michelangelo and his followers made of them.

Architectural critics have habitually equated Ligorio’s architectural style with the richly decorative stucco decoration of the facades of the casino and loggia at the Casino of Pius IV in the Vatican. This is the cause of the misattribution to Ligorio by Italian architectural historians of the so-called Palazzetto di Pirro Ligorio on the Capitoline hill in Rome. Actually, his more common architectural style is an austere mode visible on the facade of the Palazzo Lancellotti in Rome, on the northern transept of San Giovanni in Laterano, and even on the side elevations of the buildings of the Casino of Pius IV. This austere style may be the reason he was given the commission by Pope Pius V for the new Palace of the Inquisition and why some Jesuit fathers may have preferred his design for the new mother church of their order, in contrast to the successful, more genial style of Giacomo Vignola supported by the Jesuits’ principal patron, the Cardinal Farnese. The two different architectural styles visible in Ligorio’s works are undoubtedly determined by his sense of architectural decorum. The decorative mode of the facade of the Casino of Pius IV was chosen to express in a classic vocabulary the free, delightful quality suitable to a rustic retreat. The austere style is not only more appropriate for the secondary side elevations of the building but is right for structures in the context of urban architecture.

In his passion to exercise a control of classical antiquity, Ligorio created at different times in his career two very detailed, but incomplete, encyclopedias. The first, written during his residence in Rome, now in the Biblioteca Nazionale at Naples, was composed in the traditional medieval manner as a series of subject entries: inscriptions, coins, garments, and so forth. After he left Rome, Ligorio began at Ferrara a new encyclopedia, now in the Archivio di Stato at Turin, organized in a very new fashion, alphabetically, an organizing principle that will be commonly used only in the next century. Thus, his passion for classical antiquity in no way diminished his interest in innovation.

Although Ligorio was never able to publish his encyclopedias—it would have been a mammoth task given the size of the works and the great number of illustrations they would require—he did successfully publish a series of detailed maps of areas of Europe and particularly a large map of Rome, his Imago of 1561. Unlike most other maps, which limited the depiction of architecture to important, famous buildings, Ligorio’s map shows the individual monuments surrounded by blocks of vernacular architecture, now lost. He thus created a total context, setting an example for future maps of Rome.

Although Ligorio began his career in Rome as a facade painter, in 1549 he gave up this independent existence to become a salaried employee of the Cardinal of Ferrara as court archaeologist. At the same time he stopped being active as a painter, that is, a manual artisan, and attempted to present himself as a humanistic intellectual, emphasizing his Neapolitan patriciate and devising iconographic programs to be executed by others. He was henceforth to be known as a designer of pictorial programs, of architecture, and of sculpture. Soon he would progress from the relatively small court of the cardinal, secure in the latter’s patronage, to the larger and more competitive papal court. Although this position brought more renown, it also brought more danger, as Ligorio discovered in 1565, when he was imprisoned on the accusation of several of his competitors. The papal position was more insecure than that of other courts, for successive, often short-lived popes changed their desires and ideals. So Ligorio, after generous patronage from Popes Paul IV and Pius IV, was dismissed by Pius V, whose Counter-Reformation ideals were antithetical to Ligorio’s passion for classical antiquity. For the last fifteen years of his life Ligorio was exiled, as he would consider it, at the declining court of Ferrara, which was battered by nature and politics. His patron, the duke of Ferrara, was almost paranoid in his concern for the loyalty of his courtiers, as evidenced by the treatment of Ligorio’s friend the poet Torquato Tasso, who was imprisoned for his disloyalty. Vasari, Ligorio’s principal rival at the papal court, was victorious, not only in his achievement in ousting Ligorio as papal advisor to Pius V but also in the security of a generous patron in the person of the duke of Florence. In addition, Vasari was able to publish his Vite, ensuring his later fame in addition to his work as a painter and architect. Ligorio’s tremendous effort to command a knowledge of classical antiquity remained in manuscript unavailable to the public, and time destroyed most of his painting.

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