First Time in America
Exhibition of Giulio Romano Drawings
Marks 500th Anniversary of the Artist's Birth

Exhibition Dates:
September 16 - November 27, 1999
Special International Symposium November 6

Where:
Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery
Hunter College
68th Street and Lexington Avenue, New York City

Opening Reception:
Thursday, September 16, 1999
5:30 - 7:30 p.m.

Gallery Hours:
Monday - Saturday, 1- 6 p.m.
Free and open to the public.

From September 16 through November 27, 1999, Hunter College presents Giulio Romano, Master Designer, an exhibition of some 45 drawings and a small group of prints selected mainly from North American public collections and important private collections here and abroad.

Until now, there has never been an exhibition of Giulio's art in America, nor has there been one anywhere devoted exclusively to his prodigiously inventive drawings.  Only a very few of the drawings chosen for the exhibition have been shown in the United States, and many of them have never been exhibited at all except at a large show of his art in Mantua a decade ago.  The year 1999, the 500th anniversary of Giulio's presumed date of birth, is therefore an ideal time to mount this exhibition.

Giulio Romano was one of the most important, versatile, and influential artists of the Italian late Renaissance style known as Mannerism.  As the primary protégé of Raphael, he inherited his master's studio at the papal court following Raphael's death in 1520 and initially continued to work in Raphael's Roman High Renaissance style. But as his personal style matured, he became one of the great 16th-century Mannerist  painters and architects.  An artistic impresario in the service of Duke Federico Gonzaga in Mantua, Giulio built and decorated the Palazzo Te, one of the key monuments of Mannerism.  His renown in the sixteenth-century was such that he was the only Italian Renaissance artist to be mentioned by Shakespeare, who called him "that rare Italian master."

Giulio Romano was famed in his time as a virtuoso designer and draftsman.  In 1568 his biographer Giorgio Vasari praised the speed with which Giulio realized his ideas in drawings, writing that he "was always happier expressing his ideas in drawing than in painting, obtaining more vivacity, vigor, and expression."  Most of Giulio's paintings are in Italy and not accessible to American audiences, but this prolific draughtsman left preparatory drawings for a wide range of projects, including the famous erotic series of prints, I modi, which will be represented in the show.

This exhibition has been organized and curated by Janet Cox-Rearick, Distinguished Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate School and University Center, CUNY, in association with advanced graduate students from the Art History M.A. program at Hunter College (Chris Begley, Michael McAuliffe, and Valerie Taylor) and the doctoral program at the Graduate School and University Center, CUNY (Richard Aste, Elsa Homberg-Pinassi, and Margaret Schwartz).

Giulio Romano, Master Designer will be accompanied by a 144-page catalogue with an introductory essay by Janet Cox Rearick, followed by short essays and detailed catalogue entries on each of the 47 items in the show by the authors mentioned above.  It will be illustrated with full-page plates of each of the works exhibited and a rich assortment of over 100 illustrations of comparative material.

This exhibition has been generously funded by The Robert Lehman Foundation, Inc., its principal sponsor, with additional support provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Italian Cultural Institute and a number of other institutional and private donors.  The Old Master Drawings department of Sotheby's, London, is absorbing the cost of bringing to the exhibit eight outstanding drawings from European collections.

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