Getty Museum

Design for a Frieze with Worshipers Bringing Sacrificial Offerings

Date

about 1555

Medium

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white gouache, partially squared in black chalk,, on ocher paper

Culture

Italian

Department

Drawings

Institution

Getty Museum

Bearing sacrificial offerings that include a sheep and a ram *,* worshipers approach a statue of Jupiter at the right. While he took the subject matter and composition of the frieze from classical art, Lelio Orsi departed from classicism's characteristic calm and balance by populating the frieze with vigorous, squat figures who sometimes overlap the architecture. The liberal excesses of Orsi's later style are evident in the large-headed, gross-featured youth at right who presents his knifepoint for a woman to touch. Imitating an antique *bas-relief* , the relief is set into a convincing architectural structure with telamones supporting the entablature on either side. Orsi's exaggerated *chiaroscuro* helps to achieve the three-dimensional effect. Such sculptural illusionism distinguishes his drawings from those of his Mannerist contemporaries. Orsi was well known for his painted decorations on the interiors of buildings, most of which have been destroyed. Scholars know many of his designs for friezes, similarly squared for transfer, which they have often connected with decorative projects in his hometown of Novellara.

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