Girolamo Muziano
1592 · Papal States · Renaissance, Mannerism, Roman school
The story
In Rome in the 1550s a newcomer from the Brescia area, trained in the Veneto, made his first reputation with backgrounds. Romans called Girolamo Muziano il giovane dei paesi, the young man of the landscapes, for the woods and rocks he set behind his saints. When he was born is not settled, and the sources give 1528 or 1532.
Those landscapes travelled further than his altarpieces did. From 1573 the Dutch engraver Cornelis Cort, then working in Rome, made a series of large prints after Muziano's drawings of hermits and penitent saints in wild country, published under a privilege from Pope Gregory XIII, and they carried his landscapes far beyond the city. In 1569 Muziano had also gone into partnership to turn the spiral reliefs of Trajan's Column into prints, and the plates appeared in 1576 in a book by the Spanish scholar Alonso Chacón.
Under Gregory XIII he supervised the return of mosaic to Saint Peter's, in the Gregorian Chapel, where Venetian specialists carried out his designs. In 1577 he was among the prime movers in turning Rome's old painters' confraternity of Saint Luke into an academy. He died in Rome on 27 April 1592.
