Frescoes in the Palazzo Poggi, Bologna (1550-51)

In his palace in Bologna, Cardinal Giovanni Poggi (1493-1556) had the halls of the piano nobile painted by Niccolò dell'Abate, Prospero Fontana, and others. They painted friezes with landscapes and grotesques, as well as numerous episodes from the Old Testament. In the ground floor, the twenty-three-year-old Pellegrino Tibaldi created the Odysseus frescoes, a major work that he would never again equal.

The Odysseus frescoes adorn the vaults of two rooms. From the entry corridor of the palace one walks first into a large hall (Sala di Ulisse), where the cycle begins. One finds the continuation and conclusion in a smaller room directly adjoining the hall (Stanza di Ulisse). The ceiling articulation and the arrangement of the paintings in both rooms are oriented along the lines of a famous Roman model, Raphael's Logge in the Vatican Palace. The scenes are inserted as 'quadri riportati' (framed paintings that are seen in a normal perspective and painted into a fresco). Between the fields of the painted histories, illusionistic views open onto colonnades that seem to reach up to the heaven. The framings are executed in stucco.

With their various decorative systems, each of the two rooms achieves a wholly individual character, one corresponding to its respective size and position. The ceilings in the Sala di Ulisse and Stanza di Ulisse contain five and four scenes from the Adventures of Odysseus, respectively.