Polidoro da Caravaggio as the Roman God Mars

Author: Surya Stemerding

This attractive drawing was hitherto considered to be a copy after a lost work from Federico’s famous series The Life of Taddeo Zuccaro. That set of twenty drawings depicting the early life of Federico’s brother, Taddeo Zuccaro (1529-1566), preserved in Los Angeles, is among the artist’s most famous works.^[1] The drawings portray Taddeo from the moment he leaves his native town of Sant’Angelo in Vado as a young boy to his first success as an artist in Rome. Their main focus, however, is on young Taddeo’s years of struggle before he achieved any fame or success. This is not without reason. The choice of subject was entirely intentional: the drawings, dating from approximately 1595, are, as Strunck (2007) has argued convincingly, preparatory drawings for decorations in the Sala del Disegno in the Palazzo Zuccaro, Rome.

The series in Los Angeles is incomplete, for it originally included four portraits of artists, all made for the same room in the Palazzo Zuccaro. They were intended as focal points, flanked by dumbbell-shaped scenes from The Life of Taddeo, and paired with poems in which the masters portrayed address the beholder.^[2] The preparatory drawings for these portraits were described by Pierre Jean Mariette (1694-1774) in the second half of the eighteenth century as part of the series, but they seem to have been lost before 1810.^[3] The drawings, as confirmed by Mariette, portrayed Michelangelo (1475-1564), Raphael (1483-1520), Polidoro da Caravaggio (c.1499-1543), and Taddeo Zuccaro, each in the guise of one of their most famous works, but with the facial features of the artists themselves.^[4] In its time, this was a unique form of portrait historié. As such, Michelangelo was portrayed in the form of his sculpted Moses in the San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, and Raphael as in his fresco of the Prophet Isaiah in Sant’Agostino, Rome. What guise was used for Taddeo is not clear, but he is holding a scroll with a depiction of Diana of Ephesus.

The original four portrait drawings belonging to Federico’s series were lost for almost two centuries and were long known only through copies held in Florence,^[5] and elsewhere. The first of four originals to be rediscovered was the Portrait of Michelangelo as Moses, now in Paris.^[6] The Portrait of Polidoro as Mars in Rotterdam turns out to be the second. It shows Polidoro da Caravaggio in the form of the Roman god Mars, holding a scroll with a design for a facade in his left hand and a flaming torch in his right. No such painted figure by Polidoro is known today, but Mariette seemed convinced that it evoked one of Polidoro’s frescoed figures on the facade of the Palazzo Milesi.^[7] The scroll held by him in Federico’s drawing would thus refer to Polidoro’s work on the facade as a whole.

Unlike the copies in Florence, but similar to the original Michelangelo in Paris, the Rotterdam drawing shows quite an elaborate underdrawing in black chalk. Several pentimenti reveal the artist still experimenting with an alternative position for the torch and with the details of the god’s armour and clothing - something a copyist is unlikely to do. Most telling, however, is the quality of the drawing, with its beautiful sense of light and the fluent, yet accurate application of the washes. The handling of the pen demonstrates a strong and confident draughtsmanship. Since this masterly application of ink and wash is fully consistent with other pen drawings by Federico from the 1590s, the former identification of this drawing as a copy after him must therefore be erased in favour of an attribution to Federico himself.