The Story of Niobe
1575 - 1580. Wash, White lead, Pencil, Pencil ground, Grey-brown ink on paper attached to canvas.Not on display
This is one of the few copies to survive showing the whole of Polidoro´s famous frieze with the Story of Niobe, painted below the windows of the first floor of the Palazzo Milesi, Via della Maschera d´Oro, Rome. The decoration of the façade of the Palazzo Milesi in 1526-27 is the last in Polidoro´s great sequence of palace façade decorations carried out in Rome in the first half of the 1520s, before the sacking of the city in 1527 and the painter´s consequent flight to Naples. Although a few fragments from the original decoration have been brought back to light thanks to recent, clever restoration, the decoration is to all intents and purposes lost. For an engraving by Enrico Maccari of the whole of Polidoro´s façade decoration of the Palazzo Milesi. The style of the present drawing points to a copyist active in Rome around 1575-80, conceivably Avanzino Nucci (1551-1629), the artist now thought responsible for the socalled Polidoro album in the Fondation Custodia, the Institut Néerlandais, Paris.