GIROLAMO MUZIANO

Girolamo Muziano trained between Brescia, Padua, and Venice, in the workshops of Lambert Sustris and Domenico Campagnola. The artist arrived in Rome in the 1550s, probably thanks to the protection of the Venetian cardinals Barbaro, Corner, and Pisani. The positive reception Girolamo Muziano received in Rome earned him numerous prestigious commissions in the churches and palaces of the city's major aristocratic families: Gabrielli, Colonna, Ruiz, Mattei, Della Valle. In the 1560s he was the official painter for Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este, for whom he also frescoed the famous Tiburtina Villa. With the advent of Pope Gregory XIII, Girolamo Muziano became the impresario and author of the most important works of the pontificate, from the Gregorian chapel in St. Peter's, to the Gallery of Geographical Maps in the Vatican Palaces. His unprecedented counter-reformation style, tinged with soft Venetian naturalism, paved the way for innovations in early seventeenth-century painting.