Giulio Clovio

Biography

Above his tomb in Rome there is an inscription describing him as a painter from Croatia, and he himself signed his work “Croata”, that is, a Croat, although he spent almost his whole life working in Italy.

He was born in 1498 in Grižane, a village in the Vinodol valley near Crikvenica, then in the Kingdom of Croatia. Crikvenica itself is sometimes given as his birthplace. Where he acquired his first skills is unknown; it is supposed that in his youth he learned miniature painting from monks, and both Rijeka and the Pauline monastery in Crikvenica are mentioned.

In 1516, at the age of eighteen, he moved to Italy and entered the household of Cardinal Marino Grimani. Giulio Romano is named among his teachers, and according to some accounts Girolamo dai Libri as well. He may have lived in Rome in the residence of Marino’s uncle, Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and made medals and seals for him. The illuminated Grimani Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is also placed in this period: 130 vellum leaves, two large miniatures of the conversion of St Paul, and richly decorated borders. The manuscript is now in Sir John Soane’s Museum in London.

By 1524 Clovio was in Buda, at the court of King Louis II of Hungary, for whom he painted the “Judgment of Paris” and “Lucretia”. After Louis’s death at the Battle of Mohács he returned to Rome. Then come years for which there are fewer documents. According to one account, during the sack of Rome in 1527 he was taken prisoner and vowed to take holy orders if he survived; in 1528 he is listed among the novices of the Canons Regular of the Lateran and takes the name Julije in honour of Giulio Romano. He lived in monasteries of that congregation, and afterwards, it seems, was released from the obligation to reside in a cloister. In 1534 he is again in the household of Marino Grimani, probably travelled with him to Perugia, and returned to Rome by the end of 1538, when he met the Portuguese painter Francisco de Hollanda.

He then entered the circle of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and remained with him until his death. For Farnese he created the Farnese Hours, on which he worked for nine years and which was completed in 1546. It is a book of pocket size, with 26 or 28 miniatures according to different counts, among them the famous double-page scene of the Corpus Christi procession in Rome. It is now in the Morgan Library in New York. Vasari attributed its silver-gilt covers to Benvenuto Cellini, but Cellini did not make them. The illustrations for the Towneley Lectionary, now in the New York Public Library, are placed in the same period. From 1551 to 1553 Clovio worked in Florence and painted a miniature portrait of Eleanor of Toledo.

He was a friend of the much younger El Greco, who painted two portraits of him; in one Clovio points to the Farnese Hours. In another painting he stands beside Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael. In 1553 Pieter Bruegel the Elder stayed with him in Rome and painted a small medallion of ships in a storm on Clovio’s miniature of the Last Judgment. The six works by Bruegel mentioned in Clovio’s will have disappeared.

His other works include twelve full-page miniatures of the victories of the Emperor Charles V (British Library), a manuscript life of Federico da Montefeltro in the Vatican Library, the Stuart de Rothesay Book of Hours with four of his miniatures, and the Colonna Missal in Manchester. According to some testimony, he designed costumes for the wedding festivities of Ortensia Borromeo in 1565. Vasari called him the “Michelangelo of the miniature”; by tradition, he could paint the whole Last Supper on the nail of his thumb. That is hard to verify, and to me it looks like a pleasing legend.

He died in Rome on 3 January 1578, or according to other accounts on 5 January. He was buried, as he had wished, in the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, where Michelangelo’s Moses stands. In 1632 the canons placed a memorial plaque with his portrait there.