Francesco Villamena
Francesco Villamena (* 1564 in Assisi , † July 7, 1624 in Rome ) was an Italian draftsman and engraver .
Life
Villamena learned his craft from Cornelis Cort in Rome and developed into a well-known and productive artist. The representations of saints, which were in great demand at the time, made up a considerable part of his work, including several by Francis of Assisi , who came from his hometown . Villamena used paintings by artists such as Federico Barocci and Francesco Vanni as models for engravings on religious subjects . He also portrayed ecclesiastical dignitaries such as Pope Clement VIII , the cardinals Roberto Bellarmino and Cesare Baronio as well as famous contemporaries such as Christophorus Clavius , Galileo Galilei and Inigo Jones . The personalities to whom Villamena dedicated his works included Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria , the cardinals Pietro Aldobrandini and Scipione Borghese, and the scholar Cassiano dal Pozzo .
Villamena was married to Caterina († 1649) and had a son and four daughters. He died suddenly and without leaving a will. Due to the complicated inheritance situation, his estate was precisely recorded and its registers kept in the State Archives in Rome. At the time of his death he owned, among other things, a printing press , numerous printing plates, 300 prints, 828 drawings, 38 paintings and 35 sculptures. Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini the Younger bought the sculptures in November 1625 for the sum of 1,000 Scudi , the prints and drawings from a bookseller named Giovanni Antonio Rotulo in December 1625 for the sum of 800 Scudi.
Art historical significance
While Pierre-Jean Mariette expressed himself positively about Villamena, Georg Kaspar Nagler did not rate him very highly and considered Agostino Carracci , who was also a student of Cornelis Cort, to be more deserving. Nagler complained that Villamena did not take the drawing very carefully and that some of his work looked unfinished. In addition, his stitches are too uniform.
Nowadays, Villamena is considered an innovator, primarily because of some engravings made between 1598 and 1601 that depict ordinary people in a realistic way, who influenced Jacques Callot , among others . The engraving Una battaglia di Bruto (also known as La baruffa di Bruttobuono , Gli sfrenati or Les Gourmeurs ) from 1601, in which a street fight is depicted, is particularly well-known . The scene goes back to a real event, which is also documented in a Roman police report from October 15, 1601. A man was killed by stone throwing during riots between supporters of Spain and France. Villamena dedicated the work to Ciriaco Mattei , a partisan of Spain, whose servants the man who was killed may have belonged.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Francesco Villamena, Street Fight ( Memento of April 30, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
literature
- Georg Kaspar Nagler: New general artist lexicon. Volume 20 (1850).
- Dorothee Kühn-Hattenhauer: The graphic oeuvre of Francesco Villamena. Dissertation, Free University of Berlin, 1979.
- Franca Trincieri Camiz: The Roman 'studio' of Francesco Villamena. In: The Burlington Magazine 136 (1994), pp. 506-516.
- Eckhard Leuschner: Francesco Villamena's “Apotheosis of Alessandro Farnese” and engraved reproductions of contemporary sculpture around 1600. In: Simiolus. Netherlands quarterly for the history of art 27 (1999), pp. 144-167.
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Villamena, Francesco |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian engraver |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1564 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Assisi |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 7, 1624 |
| Place of death | Rome |