CIRCIGNANI, Niccolò - b. 0 , d. 0

Niccolò Circignani (also Niccolò Pomarancio), Italian painter. He may have been a pupil of Daniele da Volterra and later of Santi di Tito. In 1564 he was in Rome working on frescoes of Old Testament narratives in the Sala Grande of the Vatican Belvedere. Next, in Perugia, he formed a partnership with Hendrick van den Broeck and in 1565 replaced him in the painting of frescoes (destroyed) for Orvieto Cathedral. His paintings of this period - including the frescoes (1568) in the church of the Maestà delle Volte, Perugia, the Resurrection (1569; Mongiovino, Sanctuary) and the Annunciation (1577; Città di Castello, Pinacoteca Comunale) - are strongly influenced by late Florentine and Roman Mannerism.

From 1579 he was again in Rome, working in the Vatican, where, with Matthijs Bril, he decorated the Sala della Meridiana in the Torre dei Venti (finished before the end of 1580) and supervised works on the third floor of the Logge (1580-83). In 1581-82 he executed huge fresco cycles in Sant’Apollinare and San Stefano Rotondo, Rome, following the didactic style recommended in the post-Tridentine treatise of Gabriele Paleotti. In scenes of great emotional impact Pomarancio depicted the tortures of Christian martyrs with insistent emphasis on the cruel details. His next works - frescoes in the chapel of S Francesco Borgia at Il Gesu (1584-87), the Angelic Concert with the Eternal Father in SS Giovanni e Paolo and the Celestial Glory in S Pudenziana, all in Rome - show a stylistic evolution from late Roman Mannerism towards a more unified and monumental type of composition. His last work, the Ascension (Cascia, S Francesco), is dated 1596.

Martyrdom Scenes

The centrally planned sixth-century church of San Stefano Rotondo was restored under Gregory XIII, partly in accordance with his papal bull of 1580 uniting the colleges for German and Hungarian Jesuits at the site. Around the periphery of the interior of the church, Niccolò Circignani, who had worked for the pope at the Vatican Palace, led a team of artists that painted a fresco cycle of thirty-one scenes of explicitly graphic martyrdoms. Beginning with Christ’s Crucifixion, it continues through the execution of the Apostles and early Christian saints - appropriate subjects for the Early Christian martyrial structure. The cycle derives from a book commissioned by Ignatius of Loyola to instruct the faithful and to provide a focus for meditation on the Gospel stories through both notes and images. The frescoes are notable for their blatant didacticism, uniting words to images. Each martyrdom carries a hortatory biblical inscription across the top and each has double caption below - one text in Latin, another translating Latin into Italian - which identifies the figures in the painting.

The series of frescoes were engraved by Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri and published in a book by Bartolomeo Grassi in 1585 in Rome. At the beginning of the 17th century, the book was reworked in a laterally reversed format by Jan van Haelbeck and published in Paris by Jean Leclerc.