BELLI, Valerio
Italian gem-engraver, goldsmith and medallist. The most important part of his career was spent in Rome, where he worked for Clement VII and his successor Paul III. He also spent a short period in Venice, returning from there to Vicenza in 1530 and remaining in the latter city for most of the time until his death. In Rome he was a well-established member of artistic and literary circles, associating, for example, with Michelangelo and the humanist scholar Pietro Bembo. No specimens of his work as a goldsmith survive, but he is called ‘aurifex’ in contemporary documents and may have made the settings for his carved gems.
Belli specialized in cutting gems and crystal and in carving dies for coins and medals. His best-known works are those made for his papal patrons, many consisting of or incorporating carvings in rock crystal or semiprecious stones. The most splendid of these is a silver-gilt casket adorned with 24 carvings in crystal showing scenes from the Passion. It was completed in 1532 and sent by Clement VII to France as a wedding present on the occasion of the marriage of the Dauphin, later Henry II, to Catherine de’ Medici.
Bronze plaquettes after Belli’s works are sometimes found, produced by taking plaster or sulphur casts. Plaquettes or casts of this kind can be helpful in suggesting the form of lost works, as may be the case with the missing engraved crystals from a rock crystal Crucifix (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), which was one of his last commissions from Clement VII.
Belli is also known to have been connected with the papal mint, although no specific issues of coins can be attributed to him, and the remains of his work as an official medallist are scanty. The best known of his works in this field is a private rather than an official work, a medal bearing a portrait of Pietro Bembo (e.g. National Gallery of Art, Washington), with a reverse representing him reclining in a pastoral setting. Specimens also survive of a portrait medal that is almost certainly a self-portrait from dies engraved by Belli. This is known in several versions (e.g. National Gallery of Art, Washington), each bearing a classicizing mythological scene on its reverse.
