Giulio Romano – A Drawing from the Hertz Collection

Susanne Kubersky-Piredda

Giulio Romano, The Release of Cloelia, ca.1524, watercolor and brown ink on paper, 39.8 x 54.8 cm, Rome, Bibliotheca Hertziana (photo Bibliotheca Hertziana / Enrico Fontolan) — Giulio Romano, *The Release of Cloelia*, ca.1524, watercolor and brown ink on paper, 39.8 x 54.8 cm, Rome, Bibliotheca Hertziana (photo Bibliotheca Hertziana / Enrico Fontolan)

Giulio Romano, *The Release of Cloelia*, ca.1524, watercolor and brown ink on paper, 39.8 x 54.8 cm, Rome, Bibliotheca Hertziana (photo Bibliotheca Hertziana / Enrico Fontolan)

A research exhibition which took place in 2023 and is still visible online focuses on one of Giulio Romano’s preparatory drawings for the famous fresco cycle created for the great hall of Villa Lante on the Janiculum Hill, today preserved in Palazzo Zuccari. The recent restoration of the drawing representing The Liberation of Cloelia has provided an opportunity to highlight the special appreciation for Italian Renaissance art, and especially for Giulio Romano, held by Henriette Hertz, the cosmopolitan collector and founder of the Bibliotheca Hertziana. In 1890 Henriette Hertz confided to her diary with a discernible note of satisfaction that she had acquired the first pieces of her art collection. Among these pieces was Giulio Romano’s Madonna and Child – also called the Madonna Hertz – now housed in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini. Born in Cologne in 1846 and of Jewish origin, Hertz was at the time renting part of Palazzo Zuccari, where she resided with her childhood friend Frida Loewenthal and the chemist and collector Ludwig Mond. Over the following decades, aided by the advice of dealers and art historians, including Jean Paul Richter and Ernst Steinmann, Hertz collected a considerable number of works, mostly from the Renaissance. Among the masterpieces in her collection was the famous fresco cycle with the Legend of the Janiculum Hill, produced by pupils of Giulio Romano for the Villa Lante. When Hertz finally acquired the entire Palazzo Zuccari in 1904, she had the cycle installed in its dining room. Other rooms in her residence were decorated in the neo-Renaissance style by contemporary painters, including Edoardo Gioja. Through a series of drawings, prints, and books from the Hertz bequest and related to Giulio Romano and the Villa Lante frescoes, the exhibition aims to highlight the late 19th-century collecting practices that Hertz cultivated: the acquisition, study, restoration, exhibition, photographing, and publication of works of art.