Niccolò Circignani

He painted frescoes (1568) in the church of the Maestà delle Volte in Perugia, the Resurrection (1569 in Panicale) and an Annunciation (1577, now in the Pinacoteca Comunale, Città di Castello).

He painted frescoes (starting 1574) on mythologic themes including a Judgement of Paris, Stories from the Aenid, and others, in collaboration with Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi in the Palazzo della Corgna in Castiglione del Lago.

From 1579 he returned to Rome to work with Matthijs Bril and decorated the Sala della Meridiana in the Torre dei Venti (finished before the end of 1580) as well as in the Loggie (1580–83) in the Vatican.

These represent the martyrdoms of saints and early Christians; and such a panorama of horror and butchery no man could imagine in his sleep, though he were to eat a whole pig raw, for supper.

Grey-bearded men being boiled, fried, grilled, crimped, singed, eaten by wild beasts, worried by dogs, buried alive, torn asunder by horses, chopped up small with hatchets: women having their breasts torn with iron pinchers, their tongues cut out, their ears screwed off, their jaws broken, their bodies stretched upon the rack, or skinned upon the stake, or crackled up and melted in the fire: these are among the mildest subjects."