Design for a Candlestick

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.