MOODY BEARDS

These moody-looking fellows on the Casa degli Omenoni in Milan, like other architectural features of giant, bearded figures, are known as Telamons or Atlantes. The house belonged to sculptor Leone Leoni, built probably to his own design in 1567, the Telamons carved by his pupil Antonio Abondio, after Leoni’s models. Both artists were famed for their medals for Hapsburg patrons like Emperor Charles V, of whom Leoni also made bronze statues. In younger days, he was a condemned galley slave for a year. I love the Telamons on his house, calm and powerful presences, standing pensive amidst the rush of modern Milan.

Some more Milanese beards, below: giant stone heads on a church façade near the Duomo and two miniature sea-men, the one on the left shown full size, made from tiny shells and fish-skin, in the wonderful Settala collection in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. Below them is a Giuseppe Arcimboldo portrait as Autumn, the features constructed from natural elements by the crazily inventive Milanese painter who went from there to work for the imperial court 1562-87, most famously for Rudolph II in Prague. 

Beards, beards everywhere… In Perugia, below, a detail of the Duomo side façade, with the splendidly curled beard of a Mannerist Telamon next to a Late Gothic pulpit of 200 years earlier; a miniature one on Ferdinand of Tirol’s marble casket at Schloss Ambras; and the middle terrace of the Casino garden at Caprarola, surrounded by gigantic stone herms, their butch physiques in oddly dainty poses.