Ruptures in Painting after the Sack of Rome

Aimee Ng

The Sack of Rome of 1527 was the greatest disruption to the history of sixteenth-century Italian art. Sufficient attention has been paid to its ramifications in terms of the diaspora of artists from Rome that disseminated "Mannerism" throughout Europe and monumental papal projects executed in its wake, including Michelangelo's Last Judgment (1534-41), Perino del Vaga's decoration of the Sala Paolina in Castel Sant'Angelo (1545-47), and the propagation of a more disciplined use of classicism in architecture and literature by the papacy of Pope Paul III. Focus on these consequences, of a grand scale, emphasizes the impact of the event for papal history but has obscured to some extent a set of works that was directly and immediately affected by the Sack of Rome: paintings by artists who were dispersed from Rome, produced in cities of exile. These paintings by displaced artists are the...