Scipione Pulzone
1550–1598 · Kingdom of Naples · Renaissance, Mannerism
The story
Set a portrait by Scipione Pulzone beside the fashionable Florentine work of his day and the difference is in the detail: every thread of lace, every ring and strand of hair rendered with a jeweller's patience. Known as Il Gaetano after his home town of Gaeta, south of Rome, he built a career in Rome painting the faces of the Counter-Reformation church.
His sitters were popes and cardinals, and the Medici too, among them Francesco, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Pope Gregory XIII sat for him. Where other painters stretched and stylised their figures, Pulzone gave a sober, exact likeness that suited an age of religious reform, and he brought the same clarity to his devotional pictures of the Holy Family.
He worked mainly in Rome but also in Naples and Florence, and was among the most admired artists in Rome when he died there in 1598.
