Giovanni Baglione, in his appreciative description of Marco da Faenza’s as a “gran maestro” in his work as a decorative painter, describes him studying the frescoes of grotesques and arabesques by Giovanni da Udine in the Vatican Stanze and Logge, which had themselves been inspired by recently excavated Roman wall paintings.1
A considerable portion of Marco da Faenza’s career was spent in Rome and he was clearly familiar with the fresco decorations of the previous generation of artists, and with the classical sources of many of their motifs. Born, as his name suggests, in Faenza, he continued to work at various times throughout his career in his native city but his fame was established in Rome and in Florence. On arriving in Rome, Marchetti worked amongst the best artists of his day, including Taddeo Zuccaro, Prospero Fontana and Daniele da Volterra.2 In Florence from 1555-8, he became Vasari’s chief collaborator on the decorations of Palazzo Vecchio. The Quartiere degli Elementi part of Cosimo de’ Medici’s private apartments in the Palazzo, are considered to be Marco da Faenza’s masterpiece. 3 Returning to Rome, after 1558 he appears to have remained there until Vasari recalled him to Florence in 1563. Marchetti went to Faenza in 1565 where he continued working until the end of 1572 when he is recorded as having settled again in Rome in order to work, over the next eleven years, alongside Lorenzo Sabatini until his death and then alone, on the decorations ordered by Gregory XIII for the Logge of the Vatican. Vasari describes Marco Marchetti as a member of the Academy of Florence and as having “no equal nor one who even approaches his perfection…in the manner and practice of making grotesques”. He is reported as being creator of the greater part of the ornaments of twenty different rooms in the Ducal Palace and the friezes of the ceiling in the Great Hall.4
As Professor David Ekserdjian has pointed out, the source for the three figures on this sheet is a print by Cornelis Bos dated 1546 (Fig. 1), after and in reverse to Martin van Heemskerck’s painting Bacchanalian Procession, now in the Kunsthistorisches, Vienna.
As well as classical sculpture, Heemskerck is known to have studied Roman grotesque painting at first hand during his years in the city and the painting is an expression of his fascination with the classical world. The present drawing transcribes three figures from the right hand section of the print at approximately the same scale; the print itself measures 293 x 852 mm. the man on stilts and the acrobat appear in the print as they are in Heemskerck’s painting, though in reverse, but the satyr, along with more putti, was moved by de Bos to the foreground of the scene and therefore becomes more visible in the print. Marco Marchetti would have extracted these figures from the frieze like composition as elements or inspiration to be used in his endlessly playful, energetic and sometimes bizarre creations of decorative designs. A very similar prancing satyr appears in one of the corner panels of Marco da Faenza’s ceiling decoration in the anteroom between the terrazzo di Giunone and the Sala di Ercole in Palazzo Vecchio.5A second example of this form of extraction from printed sources, a common practice in sixteenth century decoration, is the figure of Hercules killing Cerberus in one of the roundels of the Sala di Ercole, again in the Palazzo Vecchio, which is closely based upon Jacopo Caraglio’s engraving after Rosso Fiorentino.6 Stylistically the present drawing, with its substantial figure style, belongs to Marco da Faenza’s mature work; comparisons can be made with a series of drawings in the Uffizi, Studies of Figures, n.644F, 12566F and 12543F7, as well as with the figure style of an oval fresco in the Villa Giulia in Rome, dated to around 1558.8
1. As quoted by Alessandro Cecchi in “Per la Ricostruzione dell’Attivita’ Romana di Marco da Faenza, Paragone, XLV, 529/531/533, May-June 1994, p. 89. See also, Giovanni Baglione, Le Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori, Architetti, ed Intagliatori dal Pontificato di Gregorio XII del 1572, fino a’ tempi de Papa Urbano VIII nel 1642, Naples, 1733, p. 21. “Lavorava con una mirabil franchezza e talora faceva alcuni nudi si risenti – e bene intesi in quelle figurine piccole, che era stupore a vederli, con ogni franchezza, ed agilita’ di mano terminati”.
2. Alessandro Cecchi, op.cit., 1994, p. 90
3. Alessandro Cecchi, “Pratica, fierezza e terribilita’ nelle grottesche di Marco da Faenza in Palazzo Vecchio a Firenze” in Paragone, 329, 1977, p. 6.
4. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Translated by Gaston du C de Vere, London 1996, vol.II., 779-80 and 884.
5. See also Ettore Allegri and Alessandro Cecchi, Palazzo vecchio e I Medici, Florence 1980, p. 111, fig. A.
6. Ettore Allegri and Alessandro Cecchi, op.cit.
7. See Paola Barocchi, Vasari Pittore, Milan, 1964, no. 57 a and b.
8. See also Alessandro Cecchi, op.cit., 1994, fig. 44, dated mid to late 1550’s. The Villa Giulia was designed by Giorgio Vasari and Bartolommeo Ammannati, during the brief pontificate of Giulio II (1550-1555).
