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Taddeo Returning Home with the Sack of Stones and in Bed Recovering from His Fever

Creator

Italian Artist · 1541–1609

After Titian's death in 1576, Federico Zuccaro may have been the most famous painter in Europe as well as the most influential, traveling widely and creating a huge number of works, largely of religious subjects. The son of a painter in Urbino, he absorbed Mannerism in Rome under his brother Taddeo, who was a dozen years his senior. When Taddeo died in 1566, Federico took over his flourishing prac

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Date: about 1595
Medium: Pen and brown ink, brush with brown wash, over black chalk and touches of red chalk
Culture: Italian
Department: Drawings
Institution: Getty Museum

This story in three scenes moves from right to left. First Taddeo Zuccaro returns home, slack-mouthed with exhaustion, carrying the heavy sack of stones he gathered on his back. As biographer Giorgio Vasari explained, Taddeo "carried them home and gave them to his mother, telling her they were even more precious than himself." In the center, Taddeo's parents welcome the young man warmly as he deliriously points to his heavy bag. On the left, he lies in bed, watched over by his parents and his little brother, the artist Federico Zuccaro. A large carved wooden bed with a canopy nearly fills the room. Several paintings and a frescoed cornice on the far wall and a fireplace projecting from the hidden wall form the other handsome furnishings.

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