around 1485 -1547 · Venice, Rome and alliance with Michelangelo

Venetian color, monumental figures and Roman gravity give Sebastiano del Piombo a unique place between Giorgione, Michelangelo and the High Renaissance.

Sebastiano Luciani, known as Sebastiano del Piombo, was born in Venice around 1485 and died in Rome in 1547. A musician before becoming a painter according to Vasari, he trained in the environment of Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione. His first Venetian works combined deep color, atmospheric landscape and slowly modeled figures. In 1511, Agostino Chigi invited him to Rome to participate in the decor of the Villa Farnesina. Sebastiano met Michelangelo, whose drawings and monumental designs transformed his art. Their collaboration culminated with Viterbo's Pietà and Lazarus' Resurrection, conceived in direct rivalry with Raphael's Transfiguration. In the Holy Families and Virgins the Child, color retains its Venetian richness but bodies acquire sculptural force. The Pietà concentrates pain, night and body mass in an image of exceptional gravity. A sought-after portraitist, Sebastiano also represents popes, cardinals, nobles and humanists with great psychological intensity. After the sack of Rome in 1527, he returned to the city and received in 1531 the office of guardian of the pontifical seal, the piombo, the origin of his nickname. He also experimented with oil painting on stone. He also experimented with oil painting on stone. His latest works became darker and slower, but retained the singular alliance of colored material and monumental power. The selection " Sebastiano del Piombo" notably compares The Holy Family with Saint Catherine, Saint Sebastian and a donor and The Virgin and Child with saints and a donor. His reading favors light.

Sebastiano unites two traditions that everything seemed to oppose: the breathed color of Venice and the figure carved like a Roman sculpture.