Giulio Bonasone

Giulio Bonasone (c. 1498 – after 1574) (or Giulio de Antonio Buonasone or Julio Bonoso) was an Italian painter and engraver born in Bologna. He possibly studied painting under Lorenzo Sabbatini, and painted a Purgatory for the church of San Stefano, but all his paintings have been lost. He is better known as an engraver and is believed to have trained with Marcantonio Raimondi. He worked mainly in Mantua, Rome and Venice and with great success, producing etchings and engravings after the old masters and his own designs. He signed his plates B., I.B., Julio Bonaso, Julio Bonasone, Juli Bonasonis, Julio Bolognese Bonahso.

Life

There are debates about the birth date of Giulio Bonasone due to the lack of documentation. Since he was active during 1531 to 1571, his birthday could be placed around 1513 or earlier if engraving was a part of his formal education. One reason to believe that he was still a student in 1531 is that the work dated to 1531 lacks craftsmanship and familiarity with anatomy.

Giulio Bonasone's work does not appear in published collections of documents nor in the state archives of Bologna. In one document, Bonasone is related to Compagnia dello Quattro Arte and is mentioned to be an auditor of the Guild. Nonetheless, no first name was given and his name was not found in the very few extant name lists of the Compagnia. His works include religious, secular as well as erotic content. A total of 357 prints are attributed to Bonasone, approximately 200 of which can be dated with some certainty. Bonasone's prints include 9 Old Testament Scenes, 35 New Testament Scenes, 25 about the Virgin, 8 concerning the Saints, 5 regarding historical events, 150 about parables, 85 dealing with mythology, 5 fantasies, 6 portraits and 6 about architecture. His prints usually come as series. For instance, he dedicated 22 to Loves of the Gods, 26 recounting the Life of Juno and a series of 22 prints about the Passion of Christ.

Originality According to Giulio Bonasone's own claim, more than 114 prints, not counting the ones he produced for Bocchi, are his original works. In fact, many of the 150 illustrative prints for Bocchi are his own designs as well. His own creations are usually labelled with "Giulio Bonasone Inventore" or something similar. His engravings after other artists' designs can be categorized into two groups: those that closely replicate the original work, such as the Creation of Eve after Michelangelo, and those incorporating changes at Bonasone's will, such as Clelia Crossing the Tiber after Polidoro. The latter were often labelled by him as "imitations". In fact, Bonasone's technique was consistent during the 1540s; what changed was not technique, but the way in which Bonasone dealt with light and form. His engravings, viewed from a distance, are like black-and-white paintings. By executing his engravings in such a painterly manner, Bonasone excelled as a reproductive engraver. His engravings resembled the masterpieces to a superb degree without the common problem of triteness. Bonasone made small engravings to 150 of the verses in this book. Although the engravings vary in quality, it is likely that composing and executing these engravings required a few years' work in the 1550s. Moreover, there was no work dated to the 1550s that had Roman styles. This further reinforces the theory that Bonasone spent at least part of the decade working in Bologna to produce the illustrations for Bocchi and a couple of other works at the same time.

The small size of these engravings constrains the amount of detail and the room for innovation. The lines and hatchings are usually systemized and cursory. It appears that Bonasone believed the nature of his project to be illustrative and prioritized the clarity of iconography over the style. In turn, this technique was also observed in later works by Agostino Carracci, implying the influences from Cort to Bonasone to Carracci. In Bonasone's original design, the Incarnarion, one would find the composition properly conceived but the technique distinct from that of the Judgement of Paris. The tiny flicks and subtle lines are replaced by broad contours of non-constant thickness. Although Bonasone did not adopt the method of varying a single line's depth to create the effect for shadows, he connected the deeper lines to the shallower ones to attain the same goal. Several other prints such as The Holy Family with Saints Elizabeth and John, and the Holy family with St John, could also be included in this category. However, Bonasone did not apply this technique uniformly across all his engravings. He made variation to his technique to achieve different effects, sometimes imitating the style of Giulio Romano and sometimes approximating the style of Parmigiano. he tried to make the composition more compact.

The Holy Family with St. John after Titian When Bonasone was working after Titian, the liberty he took in reproducing Raphael's paintings was hardly observable. In fact, most of his works after Titian was produced in the 1560s, when his main technique was combining etching and engraving to represent the background and foreground respectively. One representative work was his Holy Family with St. John. Bonasone preserved the soft quality in Venetian painting by using etching for the background. The composition is closer to the original than to other drawings or engravings after the relief available to Giulio to study. When the original relief was broken on the left and upper part, Bonasone has attempted to complete the design by changing the spatial relationship. Moreover, in this engraving, Bonasone endowed the nudes with a sense of majesty. Edgar Wind noticed a "touch of archaeological flatness in incidental parts of the engraving", commented that "Mars is designed with extraordinary power as the figure dominating the composition. Indeed the character is so well conceived, in his insidious readiness to release disaster, looking back at Venus while going off to war, that one wonders whether Bonasone did not have some sketch by Raphael to work on."

Since no evidence suggests the possession by Bonasone of any sketch by Raphael, this engraving actually seems to be the best representation of Giulio's use of mixed media to demonstrate the co-existence of power and beauty. The adaptation from a relief to a painterly format is what makes this engraving the most successful among Bonasone's reproductive engravings.

Giorgio Vasari Giorgio Vasari mentioned Bonasone only in connection with his prints after Raphael, Giulio Romano, Parmigiaino and other artists from whom Bonasone could possibly get his inspirations. It might be explained by the theory that Vasari had believed that Bonasone worked out of Venice, since he discussed Venetian woodcuts after talking about Giulio's prints. He mentioned the letter of one of the members of Marini family to his agent Ciotti in which Marini asked the latter to get hime some "good old prints of Giulio Bonasone, Marc Antonion or other great masters..." Nonetheless, this relationship could not be backed up by analyzing the styles of Bonasone's paintings, which have all been lost. At the same time, Lorenzo Sabbatini was believed to live from 1530 to 1576 by most historians and therefore was not experienced enough to teach Bonasone. It is possible that Malvasia made a mistake about the relationship between the two artists but he still established the fact that Bonasone was a painter on top of his career as an engraver.

Adam von Bartsch Bonasone was covered in Adam von Bartsch's comprehensive study of sixteenth-century Italian engraving. Cumberland, in a second edition, accused Bartsch of copying his earlier catalogue. However, a careful analysis of the two works would reveal enough differences to demonstrate that the two art historians probably compiled their catalogues independently. Bartsch was able to analyze dated work to show chronological progression in Bonasone's techniques. He also pointed out the weaknesses of Bonasone's skills which had been previously mentioned in Malvasia's and Cumberland's comments. Bartsch tried to find reasons for these shortcomings, and suggested that Bonasone's interest was in content and composition, not in technique. He wanted to be regarded more as an artist than a technician. Bartsch appeared to suggest than the influence of Bonasone on other artists was more significant than the value of Bonasone's prints themselves. Since Bonasone created many original prints and paintings, Bartsch regarded him as a "peintre-graveur". She isolated the elements related to painting in Bonasone's works, for example, the contrast of light and shade. She thought Bonasone was a mediocre artist and gave credit to his original works.