Palazzo Te returns to celebrate, thirty years after the great monograph of 1989, the genius of Giulio Romano. The exhibition, set up in the Napoleonic Halls, investigates the relationship between erotic images of the classical world and figurative inventions produced in the first half of the 16th century in Italy. Paintings, drawings and precious objects from twenty institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Hermitage, St. Petersburg are exhibited.

The catalogue of the exhibition Giulio Romano. Art and Desire, through the essays by the curators – Barbara Furlotti, Guido Rebecchini and Linda Wolk-Simon – analyses the relations between Giulio Romano’s artistic output and the classical world, from the Modi to the large frescoed interiors of Palazzo Te, from literary allusions to the iconographic references that Raphael’s favourite pupil used in Mantua for the construction of his pictorial language.

The curators’ texts are accompanied by in-depth essays by Sergei Androsov, Alexei Nikol’sky and Andrei Cvetkov, the latest documentary innovations and the results of recent restoration of Due Amanti (The Lovers). A text by Maurizio Bettini explores the world of classical mythology, between sanction, comedy and eroticism and the insights of Madeleine C. Viljoen, James Grantham Turner and Antonio Geremicca. Historical-critical entries on the individual works on display complete the catalogue.