Girolamo Muziano

Girolamo Muziano (c. 1532 – 1592), was one of the most prominent Italian painters, active in the mid-to-late sixteenth century.

He was born in Acquafredda, near Brescia, but active mainly in Rome.

The accounts from the 16th to 20th centuries regarding Muziano's life said he began work under the tutelage of Romanino, an imitator of Titian. Yet, a nearly autobiographical story of Muziano written by his confessor (unpublished until 1954) indicates instead that Muziano was born in Brescia, and left this town as a young man, and that his first apprenticeship was under Domenico Campagnola and Lambert Sustris in 1544–46 in the town of Padua. He then spent time in Venice until 1549, but moved permanently to Rome about 1550.

He was known there as Il giovane dei paesi (the young man of the landscapes), but although he continued to draw and paint landscapes throughout his career, he aspired instead to grand manner figure painting. He painted historical painting in a style based largely on Michelangelo, giving great prominence to the monumental anatomy of his figures, even in works with ascetic saints as their subject. His Resurrection of Lazarus (1555) was painted for the Colonna palace in Subiaco. It established his fame; Michelangelo himself pronounced its author one of the "first artists of that age". The painting was later placed in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore above the artist's tomb; it was afterwards transferred to the Quirinal Palace, and now is in the Vatican Pinacoteca. The painting returns to a spatial organization and narrative composition more typical of the High Renaissance than of Muziano's Mannerist contemporaries.

Muziano came to be the leading artist in Rome during the 1570-80s, painting in a style that appealed to Counter-Reformation patrons. He worked for Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este from 1560–66, and his frescoes for the Cardinal's villas in Tivoli could be seen in Villa d'Este.

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