The careers of Taddeo Zuccaro (1529-1566) and his brother Federico (c. 1542-1609) mark the transition from the Mannerist style, of which Taddeo was the last master, to the Baroque, which Federico helped to create. E. James Mundy suggests that by the time of Taddeo's death, the Counter Reformation had moved Italian artists from the playfulness, deliberate obscurity, and stress upon the discovery of a distinctive style or "maniera" to the creation of "clear, religious messages meant to stir the spirit" (p. 14). Taddeo, who was his brother's first teacher, was a Roman artist; Federico an international one, welcome at the courts of several popes, English and Spanish monarchs—Federico spent over a year in London, living in the house of the Earl of Leicester, waiting to see if Queen Elizabeth would assign him a major painting commission (she didn't) and painting her portrait and that of the Earl, among others—and the Doge and Senate of Venice. Mundy suggests that "while Taddeo might be said to revel in the local artistic dialogue, Federico would aspire, in his drawing, painting, and his theoretical works, to a visual form of Esperanto . . . equally at home in Rome, Venice, or Madrid" (p. 15). Unlike Taddeo, for whom, as for Michelangelo, the human body was the primary means of conveying meaning in art, Federico used the common language of symbols (undergoing codification in the manuals of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries so that gentleman could understand the vocabulary of the new generations of artists). "When this language was decoded, it carried a specific meaning that spoke to a sophisticated, educated audience" (Mundy, 20).

Select Bibliography: Suzanne Folds McCullagh, and L.M. Giles, Italian Drawings Before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Bonita Cleri, Federico Zuccari: Le idee, gli scritti (Milan: Electa, 1997); J.A. Gere, Taddeo Zuccaro: His Development Studied in His Drawings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Diane De Grazia, Corregio and His Legacy: Sixteenth-Century Emilian Drawings (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1984); E. James Mundy, with the assistance of Elizabeth Ourusoff de Fernandez-Gimenez, Renaissance Into Baroque: Italian Master Drawings by the Zuccari, 1550-1600 (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Center, 1989); Sotheby's, New York: Drawings by Taddeo and Federico Zuccaro and Other Artists AND Life of Taddeo Zuccaro from Collection of British Rail Pension (NY: Sotheby's NY, 1990).