Excerpted from Davis, Bruce. Master Drawings in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997, 26–29.
Although trained in Bologna with his architect father, Pellegrino Tibaldi spent a few crucial years in the late 1540s in Rome, where he worked on several major commissions, such as the Rovere Chapel in the church of Santissima Trinità dei Monti and the Sala Paolina in the Castel Sant’Angelo, with Daniele da Volterra, Marco Pino, Jacopino del Conte, Sicolante da Sermoneta, and other leading mannerist painters. Perhaps most significant for Tibaldi’s development was his absorption of Michelangelo’s vigorous style and its exaggerated muscularity, represented at that time by The Last Judgment and the Cappella Paolina frescoes. Tibaldi returned to Bologna about 1553, where his most important patrons were the Poggi family. His later career was spent in Milan and Spain.
The wiry and curvilinear delineation of these figures owes a considerable stylistic debt to Perino del Vaga’s draftsmanship, with which Tibaldi would have been familiar during his stay in Rome. The daring and bravura perspective, however, is Tibaldi’s own invention. The figures were employed in his ceiling fresco decoration, datable to about 1555–58, in a room in the Palazzo Poggi in Bologna devoted to the story of Ulysses. The dancing figures were used as decorative devices, boldly viewed di sotto in sù (seen from below), with no relation to the historical narrative of the Greek hero. His innovative architectural illusionism had significant impact on later Bolognese artists, particularly the Carracci family and other decorative painters.
