A Painter's Academy

In Il passaggio per Italia, Federico Zuccaro establishes mobility as a theme in and of itself voiced in the first person. But his work also reveals mobility’s uneasy and ambivalent rapport with the concept of style. The elliptical stance on maniera, the almost willful suppression of travel’s impact on the mechanics of Federico’s eye and hand, had ample precedent in the writings of Vasari, Armenini, and Dolce. Travel as aesthetic experience and leisure instead of the hard and weary path, be it …