Tommaso Laureti

This commission from Pope Pius IV is undoubtedly Laureti's most familiar public work (illustration, left below).

His frescoes in the Sala dei Capitani in Michelangelo's Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Campidoglio, painted in 1587-94, depict episodes from Ancient Roman republic: The Justice of Brutus; Horatius Cocles defending the Pons Sublicius; Victory at Lake Regillus; and Mucius Scaevola before Lars Porsena.

In 1582, the administration of Pope Gregory XIII commissioned Laureti to execute a series of frescoes on a post-Council of Trent triumphalist theme, The Triumph of the Christian religion on the newly vaulted ceiling of the Sala di Costantino or Hall of Constantine, where the walls had been frescoed by the school of Raphael earlier in the century.

[4] Laureti's perspective design for a portion of an illusionistic ceiling, seen as di sotto in su or 'from below to above', was engraved for Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola's, Le due regole della prospettiva pratica., 1583 (illustration, right).

Laureti was the second principe or director of the Accademia di San Luca or the artists' academy in Rome, succeeding Federico Zuccari in 1595.