The restoration of Pellegrino Tibaldi's spectacular Baptism of Christ occasioned a conference that took place in Ancona in 2019 on the artist's activities in Marche. During the 1550s, he executed major works in painting and stucco that included a chapel in the Santa Casa in Loreto, considered by Vito Punzi; the Baptism altarpiece once in Sant'Agostino and the lost Resurrected Christ on the high altar of the cathedral in Ancona; and the vault of the Loggia dei Mercanti, surveyed by Marina Massa. Of the chapel in Loreto, only the detached wall frescoes survive; the Christ figure in the cathedral was destroyed in the eighteenth century, and the merchants’ loggia was bombed during WWII, leaving only a few fragments. This, combined with Marche being outside of the art historical mainstream, makes the publication particularly welcome.
In his Felsina pittrice of 1678, Carlo Cesare Malvasia accused Giorgio Vasari of being silent about a substantial number of Tibaldi's works. Many of Malvasia's attributions, however, are overly optimistic. Despite the writer's good intentions, he did Tibaldi a disservice by making him seem a very unequal painter and not, as he arguably was, the most original follower of Michelangelo during the first decade of his career. Malvasia's legacy is addressed in Matteo Procaccini's essay on the Palazzo Ciccolini in Macerata, as well as in Vittoria Romani's illuminating introduction to the volume. The painted frieze on the piano nobile of the grand hall in Angelo Ferretti's Ancona palace she convincingly positions in the ambience of Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta rather than Tibaldi. The one frieze inside the palace of which there has been some agreement regarding Tibaldi's authorship, the Old Testament story of Joseph, is now given to his workshop by Valentina Balzarotti and Giulia Daniele. Ferretti, a leading member of the Anconitan merchant nobility who reappears in documents related to Tibaldi, is the subject of documentary studies by Pamela Galezzi and Maurizio Ricci. While in Ancona, Tibaldi encountered Carlo Borromeo, protonotary apostolic and archbishop of Milan, whom he would serve as architect. Their relationship is the topic of Camilla Colzani's contribution. Among the strengths of the volume is the consideration of new or little-known drawings, and here, in particular, Paul Davies's essay on architectural drawings stands out.
The section on the lost high altarpiece of the cathedral of San Ciriaco is rather problematic. The contracts for the high altarpiece of July 1559 reveal that the patron, an Armenian merchant, initially hired a certain “Prospero de Volterra da Fontana dictus de fiorenze, pictore e scultore,” a mix-up of Prospero Fontana and Daniele Ricciarelli. Four days later, a new contract was drafted between the mysterious artist and Tibaldi, agreeing to work on the monument while the latter was in Rome, where he lived and had many important projects to carry out. This alone excludes Fontana, but there is a stronger argument for Ricciarelli's authorship: first, because the project accommodates his biography and artistic practice, and second, because only a star could get away with taking on that kind of commission only to outsource it and leave town. Yet Daniele concludes that the artist could only have been Fontana because of a reference to his figliuolo working as assistant. The artist from Volterra had a nephew, Leonardo Ricciarelli, who embarked on a career as stuccatore. Surely, the notary's assistant who confused the names was also capable of mistaking a nephew for a son.
At a moment when Michelangelo was accused of impiety, Tibaldi through imitation turned the controversy over the older artist into a source of fascination, with striking results. The Loggia dei Mercanti features at the center a Last Judgment surrounded by virtues, including a nude stucco Charity with flames emerging from a slit between her breasts, while a painted Minerva tramples the genitals of a subdued, naked man. According to the publication under review, Tibaldi is not a strange artist, but a source absent from the bibliography reveals how controversial his works could be: El Greco, in his postille to Vasari, calls the Loggia dei Mercanti “la más sucia y gofa obra que en público se puede ver” (“the filthiest and most foolish work that one can see in public”).
