Pirro Ligorio

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Early modern portrait

Pirro Ligorio (* 1514 in Naples , † October 30, 1583 in Ferrara ) was an Italian painter , antiquarian, architect and garden architect of Mannerism .

Villa d'Este, Fountain of Neptune and water organ

plant

painter

Pirro Ligorio initially worked for the Caraffa family in Naples. His first biographer, Giovanni Baglione ( Le vite de'pittori, scultori, architetti , Rome 1642) does not provide any information about possible works from his early period . In 1534 he came to Rome. The only work of his painting that has survived to this day is the fresco, created after 1542, depicting the dance of Salome in the Roman Confraternità di S. Giovanni Decollato. Ligorio studied ancient ruins and sculptures as well as ancient coins and tools in Rome. With the entry into the service of Cardinal Ippolito II. D'Este in 1549 his painting took a back seat. On behalf of the cardinal he began excavations at the villa of Emperor Hadrian near Tivoli .

architect

In his work as an architect, he first created the Palazzo Torres (now Lancellotti) on Piazza Navona in Rome (around 1553). A collaboration in the designs for the villa of Vicino Orsini in Bomarzo with the Sacro Bosco , also called Parco dei Mostri , is suspected again and again. From 1557/58, at the time of Pope Paul IV (1555–1559), he appears in documents as a papal architect. For Pope Pius IV (1559–1565) he designed the Casino di Pio IV in the Vatican Gardens . He became an employee of the Fabbrica di San Pietro under the direction of Michelangelo . After Michelangelo's death in 1564, he succeeded him as the chief architect of St. Peter. His collaborator was the Vignola . Ligorio only held this prestigious position for one year. He was briefly imprisoned in the summer of 1565 due to a slander and was released from papal service in November. In 1567 he returned to Tivoli and designed the garden of the villa ( Villa d'Este in Tivoli) for Ippolito d'Este , whose water features he supplied with the diverted branch of the river Aniene . After the cardinal's death, Ligorio went to the court of the Este in Ferrara . There he worked in the service of Duke Alfonso II. D'Este, among other things, as a hydraulic engineer and built the city's flood protection against flooding through the Po .

Antiquarian

In addition to the artistic works, Ligorio left behind an extensive bundle of manuscripts, which are now distributed among various archives and libraries (including the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples, Archivio di Stato in Turin). In it he brought together the knowledge of his time in many areas of archeology, often supplemented by his own observations of the ancient remains in Rome. His drawings in these volumes and on individual sheets, which he made of the ruins of ancient Rome and of the excavations of ancient buildings and finds in Tivoli, are of great value for research, even if he found a few forgeries in the 19th century, especially in the Area of epigraphy , have been proven. His additions and reconstructions of ancient statue fragments, which he helped to achieve their former perfection and beauty on paper, are rated much more positively today than in archaeological research of the 19th century: This recognized this as proof of the forger's “unbridled imagination” Ligorio ( Christian Huelsen 1901) and condemned his drawings as “completely tasteless inventions”, the descriptions of which were “entirely out of thin air” ( Hermann Dessau 1883), one recognizes today in his reconstructions the artist's attempt to, from close observation of the ancient fragments in connection with the philological studies to come to new knowledge about the world of antiquity. In 1987 a national committee was founded in Rome, which has dedicated itself to studying the works of Pirro Ligorio. This is intended to make Ligorio's extensive artistic, architectural, historical and antiquarian activity better known. In 1989 the Comitato Nazionale per l'Edizione Nazionale di Pirro Ligorio was founded, which aims to publish all of Ligorio's manuscripts in 24 volumes.

buildings

Fonts

  • Il libro delle antichità. Handwriting. MS Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale , Cod.Ital. 1129.
  • Delle antichità di Roma: Circi, amphitheatri con numerose tavole e pianta cinquecentesca di Roma. Rome 1989 (reprint of the edition Libro di Pyrrho Ligorio Napolitano delle antichità di Roma. Tramezzino, Venice 1553).
  • Il Libro di Disegni di Pirro Ligorio all'Archivio di Stato di Torino. Rome 1994.
  • Libro dell'antica città di Tivoli e di alcune famose ville. Edited by A. Ten, Rome 2005.
  • Libri degli eroi e uomini illustri dell'antichità. Edited by B. Palma Venetucci, Rome 2005.
  • Libro di diversi terremoti. Edited by E. Guidoboni, Rome 2005.

literature

  • Hermann Dessau : Roman reliefs described by Pirro Ligorio. In: Meeting reports of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Volume 40, 1883, ZDB -ID 211663-7 , pp. 1077-1105.
  • Christian Huelsen : The Hermes inscriptions of famous Greeks and the iconographic collections of the XVI. Century. In: Communications from the German Archaeological Institute. Roman department . Volume 16, 1901, ISSN  1105-1116 , pp. 123-154.
  • Erna Mandowsky : Some observations on Pirro Ligorio's Drawings of Roman Monuments. In: Rendiconti. Volume 27, 1952-1954, ZDB -ID 203801-8 , pp. 335-358.
  • David R. Coffin: The Villa d'Este at Tivoli (= Princeton Monographs in Art and Archeology. Volume 34). Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1960.
  • Erna Mandowsky , Charles Mitchell (eds.): Pirro Ligorio's Roman Antiquities. The Drawings in MS XIII. B. 7 in the National Library in Naples (= Studies of the Warburg Institute. Volume 28). Warburg Institute, London 1963.
  • Graham Smith: The Casino of Pius IV. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1977, ISBN 0-691-03915-1 .
  • Inge Maria Podbrecky: Contributions to a biography of Pirro Ligorios (1513–1583). 2nd volumes. phil. Diss., Vienna 1983.
  • Anna Schreurs : Antique image and art views of the Neapolitan painter, architect and antiquarian Pirro Ligorio (1513–1583) (= Atlas. Volume 3). König, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-88375-358-0 (also: Dissertation, University of Bonn 1995).
  • LIGORIO, Pirro. In: Mario Caravale (ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 65:  Levis-Lorenzetti. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 2005.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Huelsen, 1901, p. 130
  2. ↑ Dessau, 1883, p. 1079

Web links

Commons : Pirro Ligorio  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Ligorio, Pirro
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian painter, archaeologist, architect and garden designer of Mannerism
DATE OF BIRTH 1514
PLACE OF BIRTH Naples
DATE OF DEATH October 30, 1583
Place of death Ferrara