Leone Leoni
Menaggio, near Como, about 1509 - 1590, Milan
(b ?Menaggio, nr Como, c. 1509; d Milan, 22 July 1590).
He was probably born in Menaggio on Lake Como, though his parents were from Arezzo, and throughout his life Leone referred to himself as Aretine. It is probable that his formative years were spent learning the trade of goldsmith, perhaps in Venice or Padua. The classicism and idealism of this school formed the basis of his style. Some time after 1533 he is recorded in Venice with his wife and infant son Pompeo, living under the protection of Pietro Aretino, to whom he was related. While in Venice, Leone worked as a goldsmith and made medals and statuettes (none of which can be identified). Leone’s skill and connections secured him a position at the mint in Ferrara, although he was forced to abandon this when accused of counterfeiting, the first of several misadventures that were to plague his life. Through Pietro Aretino, Leone received an introduction to the poet Pietro Bembo, and in 1537 he travelled to Padua to prepare Bembo’s portrait medal (untraced).
Leone Leoni: Andrea Doria I (left, obverse; right, reverse), cast...By the autumn of 1537 Leone had moved to Rome, where he remained for the next three years working as an engraver in the papal mint. There he became acquainted with the major artists at the papal court, including Michelangelo and Baccio Bandinelli, who had a strong influence on his work. He also became familiar with the city’s key works of ancient and contemporary art. The Roman sojourn was one not only of intense study but also of renewed controversy. In 1538 he was a prime witness against Benvenuto Cellini, who had been charged with stealing papal jewels during the Sack of Rome (1527). Later, according to Cellini, Leone had attempted to poison him while he was imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo by sprinkling a ground diamond on his salad. Leone’s fortunes took a turn for the worse early in 1540, when, in response to a personal affront, he attacked and maimed with a dagger Pellegrino di Leuti, the papal jeweller. Leone was sentenced to have his right hand cut off, and only the last-minute intervention of powerful friends spared him, although the new sentence might have been considered even worse: an indefinite period as a galley slave in the papal fleet. Leone was chained to an oar for about a year until he was unexpectedly released in Genoa through the intervention of Andrea Doria I, admiral of the imperial fleet (see fig.).
Leone remained in Doria’s service until early 1542, when he moved to Milan to begin work in the imperial mint. His career as a coiner and medallist flourished, and he produced impressive medals of Daniele and Martin d’Anna (1544–5; Milan, Castello Sforzesco), Flemish merchants residing in Venice, and of Isabella of Portugal (c. 1545; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.), the late wife of Charles V, for Pietro Aretino. By 1546 he had been named master general of the mint of Parma and Piacenza and enjoyed a growing reputation for his medallic portraits.
Following Charles V’s victory over the Protestant princes at Mühlberg in 1547, Leone proposed to erect an equestrian portrait to the Emperor in Milan. In 1548 he was invited by Charles V’s adviser, Antoine Perrenot de Granville, Bishop of Arras, to discuss his proposal at the imperial court in Brussels, where he arrived in March 1549. After lengthy consultations with the Emperor, Leone received a commission for portrait busts and statues, the most important being an over life-size bronze, two-figured composition ultimately realized as Charles V and Fury Restrained (1549–55; Madrid, Prado). The group is a sophisticated exercise in imperial propaganda, replete with Classical allusions celebrating the Emperor as Augustus, who, having chained Fury, initiates a new era of peace. Leone’s bronze is both a technical and conceptual tour de force, as the suit of half armour can be removed to reveal Charles V in heroic nudity, a device never seen before in Western sculpture.
Leone’s period at court resulted in additional commissions from the Emperor and his sister Mary of Hungary for medals, portrait busts and statues of members of the imperial family. The most notable of these are: the bronze bust of Charles V Supported by an Eagle (1551–5; Madrid, Prado; second version, Vienna Ksthist. Mus.); the bronze bust of Mary, Queen of Hungary (1550–53; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.; see Metal, colour pl. II, fig.); and the bronze statues of Empress Isabella (1555), Mary, Queen of Hungary (c. 1549–53) and Prince Philip (1549–51; all Madrid, Prado). In the sculpted portraits of the Emperor and Prince Philip, Leone developed an idealized style rooted in the classicism of his medallic training and related to the grand imperial portraits of Titian. His iconography is rich in references to Roman imperial art and celebrates Charles and Philip as the legitimate heirs of the Roman emperors. This imagery was conceived at the height of Habsburg power and at the moment when Charles was promoting Philip’s claim to be his successor as Holy Roman Emperor.
In order to advance these projects, Charles V granted Leone a confiscated house near Milan Cathedral, ennobled him and made him an imperial knight, honours not lightly bestowed on an artist. Leone returned to Milan and worked on imperial commissions for the next seven years. In 1556 he accompanied his sculptures to Brussels, where the Emperor was residing on the eve of his retirement. Charles V asked the artist to travel with him to Spain, but Leone fell ill and sent Pompeo in his place. Many of the portrait bronzes were finished only in 1564, when Leone made a brief trip to Madrid. Indeed it appears that none was ever exhibited during the lifetime of Charles or Philip, as they are all recorded in an inventory of Pompeo’s studio at his death.
The death of Charles V and his sister Mary in 1558 ended an important phase in Leone’s career. His sources of patronage shifted away from Spain to Italy when in 1560 he received, on the recommendation of Michelangelo, a commission from Pope Pius IV to erect a tomb for the latter’s brother Gian Giacomo de’ Medici in Milan Cathedral. This project was completed in 1563 and is one of Leone’s finest achievements. The life-size, bronze standing portrait statue of Gian Giacomo de’ Medici dressed in armour and the two flanking seated bronze allegorical figures of Peace and Military Virtue are extraordinarily refined and reveal the stylistic influence of both Michelangelo and Sansovino.
In 1560 Leone also received a commission to erect a bronze monument to Ferrante Gonzaga (d 1557), the late governor of Milan in the Piazza Roma, Guastalla. Ferrante Gonzaga Triumphant over Evil and Envy was the artist’s second two-figured group and shows Gonzaga standing over a hydra and prostrate satyr, who falls backwards off the base. Although Leone had seen Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence on his return to Milan from Rome in 1560, his group has none of the mannered elegance of Cellini’s work. Leone’s satyr is, in fact, a colossal version of one of Andrea Riccio’s small bronzes, while the armed portrait of Gonzaga continues the classicized realism seen in his earlier busts and statues.
Between 1565 and 1567 Leone undertook the reconstruction of the house given to him in 1549 by Charles V. Now known as the Casa degli Omenoni (‘House of the Big Men’ in Milanese dialect), it is one of Milan’s most distinctive architectural landmarks. Its unusual façade includes a frieze relief showing two lions attacking a satyr, two half-length caryatids flanking the central portal and six herms (double life-size barbarian prisoners, which gave the house its nickname). Imposing figures of this kind had never been seen before on the façade of a house or palazzo. According to Vasari, Leone dedicated his home to Marcus Aurelius, then considered the most virtuous of the ancient emperors. Thus the prisoners, each identified by an inscription as a tribe conquered by the emperor, together with a plaster cast of the Capitoline equestrian portrait of Marcus Aurelius in the centre of the courtyard, were part of a programme in which Leone presented himself to the public not as an artist but as a gentleman in the social milieu of the Habsburg empire.
Leone’s last major commission from an Italian patron was from Vespasiano Gonzaga, Duke of Sabbioneta, for his portrait statue (Sabbioneta, church of the Incoronato). Probably executed between 1574 and 1577, the life-size seated bronze shows Vespasiano armed and extending his right arm outward in a gesture directly related to that in the Marcus Aurelius. The statue was erected in the central square of Sabbioneta in 1588 and served as the symbolic centrepiece of Gonzaga’s ideal city. The last decade of Leone’s life was occupied by his first major commission (1579) for the Habsburgs since the death of Charles V in 1558. This was for 15 colossal gilt-bronze statues for the high altar retable in the Capilla Mayor at the Escorial, near Madrid. Undertaken with Pompeo, this was the crowning achievement of his career. The majestic, broadly conceived statues convey the heroic vigour of the Counter-Reformation Church and are important prototypes for similar stylistic developments in Rome.
Leone was also known for his art collection. He had assembled a considerable number of plaster casts of both ancient and modern works, including, in addition to the equestrian portrait of Marcus Aurelius, Michelangelo’s Risen Christ (Rome, S Maria sopra Minerva), the Apollo Belvedere and the Laokoon (both Rome, Vatican, Mus. Pio-Clementino). These were complemented by his collection of paintings and sculptures, forming perhaps the first private gallery in Milan. The collection was displayed in an octagonal room on the piano nobile and included Correggio’s Jupiter and Io (Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.) and Jupiter and Danaë (Rome, Gal. Borghese), two wax sculptures and drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, drawings by Michelangelo and paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and Parmigianino among others. His gallery rivalled those of many nobles and, along with the façade of his home, was additional evidence of his discernment, means and elevated social status.
Grover Art online, accessed 1/31/2014 by E. Reluga
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