Design for a Candlestick

Giulio Romano

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Giulio Romano started his artistic career in the workshop of Raphael in Rome where he learned to execute designs in the style of his master. After Raphael’s death, he left Rome to become a court artist in his own right to the Gonzaga Family in Mantua. For over twenty years he led a team of artists, supplying designs for architecture, (fresco) paintings, tapestries, furniture and gold- and silversmith’s work which show his own ingenuity and creative sensibility. Of the silver- and goldsmith’s work, no executed pieces survive, but various designs have survived in drawings and (reproductive) prints. This design for a candlestick shows his architectural inclination, using a twisted Solomonic column as a base to support the candle. Giulio had seen the model for this column in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome where it had been brought by Constantine the Great in the 4th century AD. He used the column in his architecture design for the Palazzo del Te and repeated it here. He came up with an elegant, nature-inspired solution to support a candle, in the form of a snake whose curled-up body echoes the character of the column.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art