Parrasio Micheli and Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Reconsidering a Lost Reputation

This thesis is the first in-depth, scholarly study of the life and career of the Venetian renaissance painter Parrasio Micheli (c.1515-78) in over a century. It draws on new attributional, critical, documentary and archival evidence (including the present writer’s discovery of the artist’s criminal activity regarding Venetian convents) in representing this overlooked painter to modern scholarship. Parrasio is an unusual and fascinating subject for Venetian art historians: born the natural son of a Venetian aristocrat, yet at one time banished from the city (as this thesis can also reveal), he trained in the workshop of the leading painter of his time, Titian (this thesis posits Parrasio’s presence in the Titian’s Roman entourage in 1545-46), and received praise and his prestigious professional nickname from one of the foremost artistic literati of the period, Paolo Giovio. The thesis appraises this relationship and casts new light on correspondence concerning Parrasio on the part of other important early critical sources, including Pietro Aretino and Andrea Calmo. Parrasio decorated important state offices, including the epicentre of Venice’s international diplomacy – the Sala del Collegio in the Ducal Palace. On his death, he was buried, remarkably, beneath his own self-sponsored altarpiece (derived from a design he received from Paolo Veronese) and which featured his own prominent self-portrait. A few decades after his death, his reputation was besmirched in a biography by Carlo Ridolfi which has prejudiced his reputation and muddied his oeuvre. This thesis analyses this and other factors operative on his critical decline, and how the political events of mid-century Venice affected him and other painters of the time. In prioritising bespoke works for the Venetian ruling elite, it will be argued that Parrasio became excessively exposed to, and suffered from, the vicissitudes of his own clients’ fortunes. This thesis also clarifies and augments our knowledge of Parrasio’s serious, yet vainglorious attempt to succeed Titian as the favoured artist of the Spanish king Philip II.