Internet Katalog 1 Englisch- Version 2

Transcription

RAPHAEL AND CIRCLES
Catalogue texts by Paul Joannides
with articles from
Costanza Barbieri
Lucia Tantardini
RAPHAEL AND HIS CIRCLES
The plural in the title serves to indicate that Raphael lies at or near the centre not of one
circle but of many. One series of circles concerns his following: all his major pupils exploited different
aspects of Raphael’s own protean production, and created their own circles from specific areas of his. The
same applies to artists like Baccio Bandinelli, who were in only limited contact with him, and to Barocci,
who was born after Raphael’s death but who learned from and was inspired by his work. But Raphael’s
own life too, his own career and own work lies at the intersection of a number of overlapping circles: those
of his teachers, those of his predecessors and models, and those of his contemporaries and, sometimes,
rivals. Thus although this catalogue deals with the work of numerous artists, in one way or another,
Raphael and his work provide a privileged starting-point for their discussion.
This, at first sight, may seem surprising. Drawings by the major artists of the Quattrocento and
Cinquecento rarely come on to the market and it is unusual for a private gallery to be able to show so
coherent a group of drawings in a single exhibition. This is usually the province of museums. Of course,
there are inevitable limits. It would have been desirable to have autograph works by Raphael himself and
by his great adversary, Michelangelo, as well as by Mantegna and Polidoro da Caravaggio, the alpha and
the omega of the revival of the antique (the intellectual filiation Mantegna, Raphael, Polidoro is remarkably
direct). That there is no drawing by or after Leonardo da Vinci, to whose work Raphael was very deeply
indebted, is a major lacuna, although a distant echo of one of his works is seen here in a sketch from the
school of Giulio Romano. But even so, with drawings – some significant - by Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo,
Giulio Romano Perino del Vaga and Federico Barocci on display, and with further drawings attributed to
Rosso, Pellegrino Tibaldi and Nosadella, this exhibition does not lack for quality. But that it has an
intellectual and historical coherence much greater than could be achieved by the display of a few star items
is made possible by the inclusion of a number of copies, some by identifiable hands, some of them by artists
of real ability who are likely to be identified only by extensive further research.
It is worth saying a word or two about copies. It is probably true that the largest single class of
drawings to survive from the cinquecento is comprised of copies. All artists, especially in their youth, copy
others, yet it is an area of study that has remained under-investigated, in part because it is inherently
difficult – artists often submerge their own personalities when copying the drawings of others, in part
because copies, by their nature, are not original compositions and lack the excitement of invention,. But
copies may be original in their interpretations of their models and may be of considerable beauty in their
own right, as well as of historical importance. Thus, some of the copies after Polidoro da Caravaggio
shown here are of the highest quality and fortunately so, since were it not for copies we would know
virtually nothing of the façade frescoes of Polidoro da Caravaggio, which had incalculable influence on
later artists, and were it not for their beauty, little conception of his frescoes’ powerful inspirational effect.
Raphael himself, of course, was a supreme student of the work of other artists, and although
relatively few of his copies survive, it is clear that he must have made many. These were no doubt mostly
in lost sketchbooks. Even in his lifetime his debts to others were noted and discussed, but, like other great
painters such as Rubens, and Michelangelo himself, whose earliest drawings are copied from Giotto and
Masaccio, he invariably innovated within the modes that others established.
Copies, therefore, form a major theme of this catalogue. Another major theme is the antique: some
of the drawings here illustrate themes taken from ancient history and mythology, many other illustrate the
influence of antique sculpture, particularly Roman reliefs and, on occasion, statuary. Towards the end of
his life, Raphael was appointed superintendant of the antiquities of Rome by Pope Leo X. and indeed, the
last phase of his work has been described, with pardonable exaggeration, as his classical style. The basis of
many area of his work in the last half-decade of his life was the fusion of the compositional principles of
classical reliefs with the individualising and in-the-round qualities of free-standing statuary, and this fusion
inspired much of the work by his followers.
The present catalogue pursues in some part the antique theme. Thus there will be found here works
from the studio of or after Andrea Mantegna, the artist admired most by Raphael’s father Giovanni Santi,
and a model for Giovanni’s son in his lofty conception of art, his high status, his capacity for authoritative
design and that vast antiquarian knowledge in which he surpassed all his contemporaries and most of his
successors. Indeed, had Mantegna not lived and worked in Mantua, he would have made a superintendant
of antiquities even more knowledgeable than Raphael. Mantegna, although Raphael was never in personal
contact with him, was a powerful influence on his art, most apparently in his later Florentine and Roman
periods. The version of the scene from Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar shown here exemplifies the
prototype of the system adopted by Raphael in some of his late schemes. This section also contains a copy
after one of Mantegna’s most famous engravings, a medium of which he was a pioneer. It is fitting that it
should conclude with an early drawing by the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi. Marcantonio would later
work for Raphael – the artist who took the production of engraving several stages beyond Mantegna - and
his style at the moment that the drawing was made, when he was working in Bologna, illustrates the
sweetened assimilation of Mantegna’s severity then current in that city, and which was later to characterise
the Bolognese approach to Raphael and Giulio Romano
More significant in Raphael’s earliest development, when he worked in the Marches and Umbria,
was Perugino, whom Raphael’s father knew personally and to whom, according to Vasari, he entrusted his
son. Raphael’s precise relation with Perugino is controversial, but it is evident that aspects of Perugino’s
method, the neo-Netherlandish richness of his pictorial surfaces, and his introspective spirituality formed a
powerful current in Raphael’s early work. Indeed, Perugino is the single artists whose drawings are still
sometimes confused with Raphael’s, and his influence can be traced up until Raphael’s latest work in
Florence.
Significant too for Raphael was Baccio della Porta, who, after 1500 became the Dominican monk
Fra Bartolommeo. As a young artist in the 1490s Baccio was initially much influenced by Ghirlandaio, and
then came under the influence of Leonardo and Perugino, to some extent uniting their qualities. His work
post-1504, when he returned to painting after his theological training, developed more spacious and
animated compositions and a more grandiose figure style; this had a deep effect on Raphael, who found
Fra Bartolommeo’s expansive manner congenial for some of his late Florentine and early Roman paintings.
A later cartoon by Fra Bartolommeo’s follower Giovanni Larciani reflects some of the qualities of the
Frate’s work in the first decade. There is also here a double-sided drawing by an associate of Filippino
Lippi whose agitated and deeply excavated drapery style was of occasional interest to Raphael; he made a
double-sided sheet of copies (Paris, Louvre) after one of Filippino’s frescoes.
The section on Raphael himself does not contain, in the compiler’s view, any original drawings by
Raphael – although two of them have been attributed to him by serious scholars - but it does contain a
copy after a Florentine Madonna study (the Larciani cartoon also shows a debt to the Florentine Raphael).
It also contains a number of reflections and copies of work from his Roman period. The group is extended
here to demonstrate his influence on some unexpected artists such as Giorgio Vasari, whose delightful
Holy Family is a homage of Raphael’s Madonna di Loreto of c.1510, and to Federico Barocci, who
fervently adopted Raphael’s method of making large numbers of preparatory drawings.
This section also contains a group of four fine copies after the fictive reliefs in grisaille designed by
Raphael for the dado of the Vatican Loggia. These scenes lead directly to the antique relief style of
Polidoro da Caravaggio, to whom the execution of the now-lost frescoes has been attributed. As remarked
above, towards the end of his life, Raphael was capable of inventing in a manner that essentially absorbed
the antique. When looking at the figures in the Sala di Psiche in the Villa Farnesina, it is difficult, at times
impossible, to determine which forms are borrowed from the antique and which are Raphael’s own
inventions. But Raphael’s meditations on the classical are always infused with palpitating life, and it is
interesting to see here how a copy after the Psyche Transported reduces Raphael’s intensely physical
figure to a virtually neo-classical regularity. It is not an accident that this copy seems to be due to the
smoothest of the Raphaelisers active in Emilia, Innocenzo da Imola, who carries on the tradition of
Bolognese sweetness.
The group of drawings by and after Giulio Romano is one of the richest in the catalogue. Although
a loyal pupil of Raphael, the powerful artistic personality of the young Giulio probably had a degree of
reverse influence on his Master towards 1520, when some of Raphael’s compositions became looser. Here
the drawing of the Visitation, which was probably done within Raphael’s lifetime, modifies only slightly the
Master’s design. But the Donation of Constantine, after which there is a copy here, the last of the four
great histories in the Sala di Constantino shows a very different attitude to space from that of Raphael and,
only four years after the Master’s death, virtually no reminiscence of his style.
Giulio’s temperament was distinctively and essentially different from Raphael’s, and at times his
later work approaches more closely the unbalanced and disruptive energy of Filippino Lippi than that of his
master. Even early in Mantua his direction is very apparent. It is instructive to compare the copy after his
Psyche Transported from the Sala di Psiche in Palazzo Te with Raphael’s Psyche Transported from the
Farnesina. The da sotto in sù treatment is quite alien to Raphael and shows Giulio looking back to
Mantegna, his great forerunner in Mantua, as a source of inspiration. It was this interest in foreshortening
which was to lead to his great coup de théatre in the Palazzo Te, the vault of the Sala dei Giganti, seen
here in three linked copies by a member of his studio. The drawing by Aurelio Luini demonstrates
something of Giulio’s approach as it was interpreted later in the century, although it looks rather to
Giulio’s designs for the choir of Verona cathedral than to his work in Palazzo Te.
It was not the elegant, harmonious side of classical antiquity – on which he Giulio was a great
expert - that appealed to him, but the rough, sometimes coarse expressivity of late Roman reliefs, which he
interpreted in stucco in the Palazzo Te. A copy after one of them by Biagio Pupin, nicely brings out their
pictorial qualities and their liveliness, and this can also be seen here in the pen drawings by Girolamo da
Carpi. None of the three drawings by Girolamo in this catalogue derive directly from Giulio’s work, but
Girolamo’s drawing style was deeply affected by that of Giulio and his drawings have often been mistaken
for ones by Giulio (unfortunately there are no pen drawings here by Giulio himself). Their energetic and
nervous line is seen here to great advantage. Girolamo also echoed Giulio’s antiquarian interests, making
many albums of copies after figures from the antique, as well, sometimes, of those in paintings by Raphael
and his school, which he invariably isolated from their contexts. His copies show little concern for surface
qualities, but rather for the movement of figures and their draperies, again a close parallel to the later style
of Giulio, whose more sensuously handled studies tended to be reserved for decorative objects and
metalwork.
A small group of drawings by Perino follows. Perino was less closely connected with Raphael than
Giulio or Gian Francesco Penni. He was rather in the second circle of Raphael’s followers, and when in
Raphael’s studio, seems to have worked largely under the supervision of Giulio and Penni (whose sister he
later married) rather than directly for Raphael. The innate elegance of his approach is very obvious if the
copy after a lost design by him of Moses and the Burning Bush is compared with its obvious prototype in
the loggia. The Loggia Moses, incidentally, would have been prepared in a modello by Perino’s brother-inlaw, Penni (one of whose modelli for the Loggia is shown here in a copy). The refinement of Perino is in
part due to his early experience in Florence – less the work of his master Ridolfo Ghirlandaio than that of
Andrea Sarto (after one of whose paintings a copy by Naldini is catalogued here) and the fragile, slightly
geometricised elegance that Sarto encouraged infused Perino’s work. His love of surface effects,
elongated, neatly contained figures and intermittently broken line, is seen to good effect in his Calvary,
which also shows a trace of the north, especially Dürer, an interest to Perino’s fellow Florentine,
Pontormo, in the early 1520s, as well as to Raphael in the last years of his life. However, Raphael’s focus
was on Dürer’s narrative techniques rather than his style.
One of the richest areas of the present catalogue is in drawings after Polidoro da Caravaggio.
Polidoro was probably in the third circle of Raphael’s organisation, with less direct access to the master
even than Perino. But he was in some ways the most individual, and certainly the most powerful, of the
artists who emerged from Raphael’s shop. He executed relatively few moveable paintings, although some
of those that survive are extremely inventive and demonstrate remarkable breadth of handling; the same is
true of his drawings, particularly in red-chalk, which have a solidity and vitality hardly seen again until
Annibale Carracci; sadly there are no originals by him here. But his great and historic achievement was in
façade paintings, which demonstrated the very highest qualities of design. It was first remarked by
Alessandro Marabottini that Polidoro – in collaboration with his shadowy partner, Maturino – must have
executed approximately 40 façades within the space of about four years. To achieve this level of
production Polidoro must have employed many assistants and it is doubtful how much of their execution
would have been autograph: the very few fragments that survive are difficult to judge. But some schemes,
such as that of the Palazzo Milesi, seem to have been of a voluptuous richness, and its superior qualities
are evident in the copies catalogued here.
Polidoro’s designs are revelatory. Most of his subjects were of episodes from Classical myth or,
more frequently, history. His approach was based on the reliefs found on sarcophagi, and on the triumphal
arches and columns of Rome. These forms were re-infused with vigour and energy by Polidoro, who
always emphasised strength and physical bulk over elegance and impending movement over stasis.
Symmetry was of little concern to him, and although interested in surface effects, his figures are always
thought of as in the round. Within the matrices provided by the antique, he forced physical energy and
robust life. In the fusion of the details of antiquity with the energy of nature, he anticipates Rubens and
Pietro da Cortona, both of whom studied his work closely. Polidoro provided a great outdoor school of art
for young and not so young contemporaries: copies after figures in his work exist by Giulio Romano and
by Perino, and the latter’s large fictive reliefs in the Sala Paolina in Castel Sant’Angelo are hardly
conceivable without Polidoro’s example. Perino no doubt advised his own students to study Polidoro, and
it is artists who worked more or less under his sway in Rome in the 1540s, such as Pellegrino Tibaldi and
Giovani Francesco Bezzi, called Nosdaella, who seem to have looked at Polidoro most closely and
intelligently, and who largely based their styles upon his work. The same is true of the young Taddeo
Zuccaro.
The catalogue continues with a summary evocation of the work of Raphael’s great rival of his later
Roman years, Sebastiano Luciani, better known as Sebastiano del Piombo after the papal office that he
later received from Clement VII. The studio version of his modello of the Assumption of the Virgin for the
altarpiece of the Chigi chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, originally allocated to Raphael who designed the
whole scheme. It illustrates the continuation of the rivalry between the two artists most famous from the
great competition between Sebastiano’s Raising of Lazarus and Raphael’s Transfiguration. The
Assumption must have been devised either shortly after Raphael’s and Chigi’s deaths, which occurred
within a week of each other, or, perhaps, a little earlier, since Chigi might well have become frustrated by
Raphael’s delay in completing the project. In this design, incidentally, Sebastiano displayed a clear and
conscious debt to Mantegna in the figure of the Virgin. Also to be found here is a very early copy after the
most influential single painting that Sebastiano left in Rome, his Flagellation of Christ in the Borgherini
chapel in San Pietro Montorio, a composition designed by Michelangelo that largely superseded as a
reference point for future artists the previously canonical version of the subject made famous in an
engraving by Andrea Mantegna.
It is with the work and circle of Raphael’s greatest contemporary that this catalogue ends:
Michelangelo, who, after an initial tolerance of Raphael, turned bitterly against him. Sadly there are no
original drawings by Michelangelo here, nor are there any copies after the Sistine ceiling, although the
nude from the circle of Bandinelli evokes that scheme. But the selection includes a fine early copy after one
of his most beautiful sculptures, the Aurora and a copy after his drawing of Calvary, made at about the
same time as the Calvary by Perino. It also evokes Michelangelo’s counter-Raphael influence, notably in
the modello attributed to Rosso, which shows a clear debt to his most severe compositional style,
combined with complexly drawn figures. But it also contains a novel curiosity which shows – to an extent–
a reconciliation among the traditions. A copy after one of Michelangelo’s famous Presentation Drawings,
the Dream of Human Life is to be found on a sheet which comes from the close circle of Giulio Romano
and which contains on its verso copies after lost drawings by Giulio himself, including one which refers to
a composition by Leonardo.
The last drawing in this group is a copy by Cherubino Alberti after the highly sculpturesque figure
of Simon of Cyrene in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement. Dating from the end of the sixteenth century, it
was probably made in preparation for Cherubino’s engraving of the same figure. It is, to an extent, a
summary retrospect. It is drawn in a pen technique that looks back directly to the type of pen study made
by Michelangelo himself at the beginning of the century, a style that profoundly affected the young
Raphael. Alberti’s pen-work also evokes, in its precision and its relation to his engraving, the pen drawings
of Mantegna and, of course his engravings. So Cherubino’s study draws together many of the themes of
this catalogue. Although it is a copy after a late work by Michelangelo it looks back to his early work and
to that of his rival Raphael; it looks back through both of them to Mantegna and, in the nature of the
physical form, which resembles marble, to the antique. And finally, it demonstrates once again the
strikingly high level of quality that some copies attain.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Mathias Hans and Anne Auger as well as to Costanza Barbieri, Anne Varick Lauder and
Lucia Tantardini
INDEX
ALBERTI, CHERUBINO............................................................................................................................53
BANDINELLI, BACCIO..............................................................................................................................48
BAROCCI, FEDERICO...........................................................................................................................24,25
BEZZI, GIO. FRANCESCO..........................................................................................................................42
CARAVAGGIO, POLIDORO DA........................................................................................................39,43,45
CARPACCIO, VITTORE................................................................................................................................5
CARPI, GIROLAMO DA.........................................................................................................................32-34
FRA BARTOLOMMEO.............................................................................................................................9-10
IMOLA, INNOCENZO DA ..........................................................................................................................21
LARCIANI, GIOVANNI..............................................................................................................................11
LIGORIO, PIRRO........................................................................................................................................20
LIPPI, FILIPPINO........................................................................................................................................7
LUINI, AURELIO........................................................................................................................................35
MANTEGNA, ANDREA............................................................................................................................1-4
MICHELANGELO........................................................................................................................................50
NALDINI, GIOVANNI................................................................................................................................ 12
PENNI, FRANCESCO..................................................................................................................................19
PERUGINO, PIETRO...................................................................................................................................8
PIOMBO, SEBASTIANO DEL................................................................................................................46,47
PUPINI, BIAGIO.........................................................................................................................................29
RAFFAEL..........................................................................................................................................13-17, 22
RAIMONDI, MARCANTONIO......................................................................................................................6
REGGIO, RAFFAELLINO DA...................................................................................................................44
ROMANO, GIULIO...............................................................................................................18,26-28,30,31,51
ROSSO FIORENTINO.................................................................................................................................49
TIBALDI, PELLEGRINO.......................................................................................................................40,41
VAGA, PERINO DEL.............................................................................................................................36-38
VASARI, GIORGIO……………………………………………………………………………………………23
VOLTERRA, DANIELE DA………………………………………………………………………………….52
ANDREA MANTEGNA AND HIS CIRCLE
Andrea Mantegna (after)
Isola de Carturo/Padua 1431 - 1506 Mantua
1
PROVENANCE:
Bacchanal with a Wine Vat
Blak chalk with pen and ink and brown wash; 312 x 410 mm.
A. P. F. Robert-Dumesnil
This is a very competent copy after Mantegna’s famous engraving of a Bacchanal with a Wine
Vat, the original version of which seems first to have been printed in the early 1470s and issued in
very limited numbers. The design was much admired and several engraved copies were made, all of
which imitate closely the original in both style and dimensions. These prints were, in turn, copied as
a whole or in part by draughtsman eager to absorb Mantegna’s ideas. There is a fine copy – or rather
the counterproof of fine copy - in Oberlin which is drawn in red chalk and is probably similar in date
to our drawing (278 x 419 mm.; see Stechow, no. 233), and later copyists included Rubens, whose
admiration for Mantegna was intense, and who made a splendid copy of the heroic nude holding the
cornucopia. Indeed, Mantegna was one of the few quattrocento painters who continued to hold the
attention of artists into the seventeenth century
The present drawing was made from one of the later imitation engravings, specifically that
attributed by Suzanne Boorsch to the Master of 1515 (See Boorsch, 1992, no.78). That engraving,
which is in the same direction as Mantegna’s original (unlike that generally attributed to Giovanni
Andrea da Brescia [Boorsch no.77], which is reversed), is differentiated from it by its slightly coarser
execution and by the fact, which is immediately germane to the present drawing, that one of the
leaves of the apple tree touches the post supporting the grapevine, whereas in the original there is a
gap between leaves and post. The fact that the present copy follows the version by the Master of 1515
implies for it a date after 1500.
This copy is particularly interesting in that its draughtsman employed brush over the pen
work to enhance the variations of chiaroscuro that Mantegna and his engraver copyists were
compelled to realize in graded hatching. This modulation of medium in this drawing gives the scene
an atmospheric unity and a pictorial lightness absent from the engravings, and unlike the Oberlin
copy which preserves the hatching system of the original. It may have been made in preparation for
a rendering of Mantegna’s design in a painting or a fresco, or it may simply be a re-interpretation in a
more modern idiom.
Paul Joannides
Workshop of Andrea Mantegna
2
The Bearers of Trophies of Arms, Coins and Plate,
Pen and ink and blue wash, 266 x 233 mm.
PROVENANCE: Col. L. Delatigny; Lugt Suppl. 1768A
Berkely, Sheffield, A. Doncaste
Hotel Drouot, Auktion 4.5. 1937, Lot 266
This remarkably subtle and sensitive drawing, whose quality was first recognized by Dr. Peter
Dreyer, must have been made by a draughtsman with intimate access to Mantegna's studio. It is
obviously very close to Canvas III of the Triumphs, the Bearers of Trophies of Arms, Coins and Plate,
but it was not copied from it, since in that canvas the figures, although broadly in the same poses,
are substantially taller and their costumes considerably simplified. It comes much closer to a pen
drawing in the Albertina (Inv. 2584, 260 x 261 mm.; see Martindale, p.164) generally agreed to be a
copy of a lost preparatory drawing by Mantegna for Bearers of Trophies of Arms, Coins and Plate. In
the present drawing, however, the design is trimmed at the edges and somewhat compressed
laterally. In detail the costumes and facial types of the figures are very similar to one another, but in
the Albertina drawing, the process of figural elongation has begun, which implies that the present
drawing was based on a study or studies made at an earlier stage in the design process.
There is also a more significant difference. The present drawing contains a figure found neither
in the Albertina drawing nor in Canvas III: the man carrying the statue who appears in the left
foreground. This figure is in fact found in Canvas II of the Triumphs depicting Colossal Statues on
Carts, a Representation of a Captured City, Siege Equipment, Inscribed Marble Plaques and Images. It
would be easy to assume that the draughtsman simply borrowed him from Canvas II to fill a gap in
the composition, to make the present adaptation more complete in itself. However, this cannot be
the case, for the figure as drawn here stands in the same relation to his painted counterpart in Canvas
II as the other figures drawn here do to the painted figures in Canvas III. This figure, that is to say,
was not copied from that in Canvas II but must have been taken from a preliminary drawing by
Mantegna which survives neither in the original nor in a copy. Whether this figure was initially
intended by Mantegna to be placed in the scene depicted in Canvas III and was then switched to
Canvas II or was always intended for Canvas II and was transferred to the present drawing by a
draughtsman who knew two different preparatory drawings by Mantegna cannot be decided. But in
either case, it is evident that the draughtsman must have been a member of Mantegna's studio and
possessed of much more than a passing acquaintance with Mantegna's work and creative procedures.
The present drawing is also very close to Mantegna technically. The sophisticated
employment of coloured wash is a technique in which Mantegna - almost alone among his
contemporaries - specialised, and coloured drawings can be found both by Mantegna himself and by
his closest followers.
The draughtsman who made this drawing petrified Mantegna's design and his individual
figures, as though returning to Mantegna's own sculptural sources. The solid washes that establish
the background read like a base of dark stone against which the pale figures stand out. The overall
effect is reminiscent of deeply-cut relief by a sculptor like Bambaia. It can hardly be coincidental
that one of Mantegna's interests in the years around 1500 was in making painting in simulation of
different types of relief sculpture, including those with white or grey marble figures on coloured
marble grounds. It is tempting to think that this drawing was made to envision Mantegna’s
composition translated into sculpture.
Paul Joannides
Andea Mantegna (after?)
3
PROVENANCE:
The Head of a Man
Red chalk; 247 x 185 mm.
S. Woodburn
This drawing probably reproduces a lost painting or drawing by Mantegna, but the use of red
chalk, a medium that is rarely found before the end of the quattrocento, suggests that it was made
after 1500, when red chalk came into more widespread use.
The drawing clearly shows a portrait of a specific individual rather than an idealized type unlike the next drawing to be discussed – but it does not seem plausible as a record of an independent
portrait made either in a painting on panel or canvas or in drawing (Mantegna certainly made
independent portrait drawings but there is little consensus about the status of those that have been
attributed to him). It seems more likely that this head records that of a figure playing a subsidiary
part in some larger scheme, such as the so-called Camera degli Sposi in the Ducal place in Mantua,
frescoed by Mantegna between the late 1460s and the early 1470s. Considered some such context, it
becomes clear that the slight flattening of the features in this drawing is not an eccentricity on the
part of the draughtsman but registers the position in space of the personnage represented. There is, in
fact, a close similarity of physical type, angle of vision and volumetric compression – although
certainly not an identity - with the unknown member of the Mantuan court standing second from the
right in the fresco of the Marquess Lodovico Gonzaga meeting his Son. It may be that the present
drawing records a study made by Mantegna in preparation for that scheme or for some other that has
not come down to us.
Paul Joannides
Circle of Andrea Mantegna
4
The Head of a Young Man
Red and black chalk, 259 x 205 mm.
PROVENANCE: Sir R. L. Mond, Lugt 2813a
LITERATUE:
T. Borenius, R. Wittkower “Catalogue of the collection of drawings by the old Masters”,
Kat.-Nr. 175,Tafel 27
Although it was attributed to Jacopo Palma il Vecchio when it was in the Mond Collection,
this drawing bears no relation whatsoever to Palma’s work. The type is clearly Mantegnesque and
this head can be compared with several of those in the Triumph of Caesar, in which Mantegna
included a number of figures who look back over their shoulders to counterpoint the prevailing rightleft flow of the procession. The present head cannot be identified with any of those in the paintings as
they stand, but the drawing might record a head planned for inclusion in one of the episodes of the
Triumph but which was eliminated in the final redaction. There is, for example, a close similarity
between the head in this drawing and that of the young man in the centre of a preliminary study
(known in a copy in a French private collection; Martindale plate 52), much modified in execution,
for Canvas V, the scene of Trumpeters, Oxen with Attendants, and Elephants.
Mantegna must have made many studies of heads for his subject paintings but none survive,
and the few pure portrait studies that have been attributed to him are highly controversial.
Paul Joannides
Attributed to Vittore Carpaccio
ca. 1455 - Veneding - 1526
5
The Child Blessing
Pen and ink; 115 x 142 mm.
PROVENANCE: Col. d`Este
LITERATURE:
Leonardo d Vinci – Künstler, Erfinder, Wissenschaftler, Historisches Museum der Pfalz,
Speyer 1995, S 196f.
EXHIBITION:
Leonardo da Vinci - Künstler, Erfinder, Wissenschaftler, Historisches Museum der Pfalz,
Speyer 1995 -2001
Historisches Museum der Pfalz, Speyer , Deutschland
Kunsthal Rotterdam, Niederlande
Schottenstift Wien, Österreich
Museum of Science, Boston, USA
Singapore Art Museum, Singapur
Seoul Arts Center, Korea
Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, Kanada
Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Südafrika
National Museum of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slowenien
National Museum of History, Taipeh, Taiwan
National Science and Technology Museum, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zürich, Schweiz
Although this drawing has been published as by Bernardino Luini (see Härich, 1995, pp.1967) the compiler can find no relation whatsoever either to that artist's drawings or to his paintings, a
view with which Lucia Tantardini, who is preparing a thesis on the drawings of both Bernardino and
Aurelio Luini, concurs. The subject seems to be the Christ Child resting on a a representation of the
world, as in compositions by Sebastiano del Piombo, raising his hand in blessing. He may be blessing
the young Saint John the Baptist, who is not included in this drawing – which is clearly fragmentary
- but whose presence might be inferred.
The compiler can however see a close relation to Venetian drawings, in particular ones by
Vittore Carpaccio. It is not quite close enough to any of his drawings to allow one to make a positive
attribution but there are powerful indicators. The same goggle eyes appear frequently in his drawings
he often uses repeated vertical stokes to establish the volume of figures’ backs. Furthermore, the pose
of the Child, which is ultimately derived from Mantegna, an artist who influenced Carpaccio greatly,
was used by Carpaccio in a similar form in the Sacra Conversazione in the Petit Palais in Avignon, of
c.1500, but in which the Child is seen from the front. It is tempting to think that Carpaccio made a
plastic model of the figure to reproduce from different angles.
Paul Joannides
Marcantonio Raimondi
1480 - Bologna - 1530 (around)
6
Recto: A Standing Woman holding an Orb
Verso: A Nude Woman gesturing in Surprise?
Recto and verso: Pen and ink; 174 x 83 mm.
Although Marcantonio Raimondi is best known as the most accomplished and innovative of
the engravers who worked with Raphael, the present drawing was made before he went to Rome and
is best grouped with the work by the followers of Mantegna whose influence is very apparent both in
the physical type and in the pen-handling of the recto figure.
Marcantonio’s activity as a draughtsman was largely reconstructed by the late Professor
Konrad Oberhuber in 1988 and his conclusions have not been contested. At the period that the
present sheet was executed, c. 1503-1504, Marcantonio was working in Bologna where he was heavily
influenced by Francesco Francia and also by Ferrarese art, especially that of Lorenzo Costa. While
neither of Francia nor Costa was a pupil of Mantegna, both painters were deeply affected by his style,
and Costa, of course, made paintings for the studiolo of Isabella d’Este to accompany those by
Mantegna. But neither was attracted to Mantegna’s severity and both endeavoured to prettify his
forms. It was in the atmosphere of ‘soft’ classicism that reigned in Bologna and Ferrara in the first
decade of the cinquecento that Marcantonio was formed, and it was an experience that permitted his
relatively easy transition to the orbit of Raphael.
The recto drawing, which probably represents a sibyl or a seer, is very close indeed to one in
the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin (KdZ 2371; Oberhuber, 1988, pp. 63-64, fig. 4; pen and ink; 194 x
107 mm.). At first sight one of the drawings might seem to be a copy of the other, but they differ in
various details (such as, among others, the arrangement of the hair, the hang of the sleeves and the
neckline of the drapery) and it seems likely that the two were originally successive pages of the same
sketchbook, with one drawn in revision of the other. Oberhuber, discussing the Berlin drawing,
referred to Ferrarese Tarocchi cards as among the models for the figure, and he mentioned also its
relation to Marcantonio’s earliest engravings. Indeed, the figure bears a close similarity to those in
the engraving of Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Lucy, given by Oberhuber to Marcantonio after a
design by Francia (Oberhuber, 1988, no.10, pp.108-110).
The verso drawing on the present sheet represents another facet of Marcantonio’s graphic
style. It is largely in outline, with a minimal quantity of hatching on the left high, and the volumes
of the figure are conveyed by subtly differentiated stressing of the contours. It is more firmly and
more volumetrically conceived that the majority of Marcantonio’s drawings in outline or primarily in
outline (see, for example, Oberhuber, 1988, figs. 31, 35, 41, 46) but it is very similar in its strong but
skillfully modulated contours to one of the most active of Marcantonio’s figures, the Running Man
seen from behind in a drawing in the Musee Bonnat, Bayonne (Oberhuber, 1988, fig. 33).
It seems likely that the verso figure was drawn in preparation for a narrative composition. A
Judgement of Paris, which would justify the figure’s nudity is an obvious possibility (and
Marcantonio did engrave a version of the theme, probably after a design by Francia c.1504-1505 (see
Oberhuber, 1988, no.14, pp. 117-18). But this figure seems too active for this theme and it was
probably made for a more dramatic subject, such as that of Pyramus and Thysbe, dated 1505
recto
verso
(Oberhuber, no.19, pp. 127-128). It seems evident that Marcantonio was interested in exploring styles
more lively than the rather bland manner then current in Emilia, and this may have been one of the
artistic (as opposed to economic) reasons that he turned next to the imitation of Dürer, and then to
engraving the compositions of younger more innovative artists, first in Venice and then in Rome.
Paul Joannides
ART IN UMBRIA AND FLORENCE IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE QUATTROCENTO AND
THE EARLY CINQUECENTO
Circle of Filippino Lippi
Florenz ca. 1406 - 1469 Spoleto
7
Recto: Studies of Draped Figures
Verso Studies of Draped Figures
Metalpoint with white body colour on orange-red prepared ground; 190 x 145 mm.
PROVENANCE: E. Piot
The recto and verso of this sheet study what seems to be the same elaborately draped young
man seen in four different poses. Whereas both drawings on the recto are drawn the same way up, the
two on the verso are drawn inversely: it is unclear why.
Voluminous draperies articulated by sharp, osseous, ridge-like folds and deeply scooped
declivities, are very much in the manner of Filippino Lippi, and are a characteristic of his style. Such
complex garments are not studied merely to display virtuosity: they serve to establish, activate and
develop the emotions of the figures - and to communicate them. This type of drapery derives
ultimately from the work of Donatello in the 1430s, particularly the statue usually identified as
Habbakuk on the Campanile of Santa Maria dei Fiori. It is a type that was to be superseded by the
smoother, flowing drapery styels of Leonardo and Raphael.
Exercises of this kind have survived in large numbers and they are surveyed by Gigetta dalli
Regoli in her invaluable catalogue of 1975. The present sheet, which came to light after Dalli Regoli’s
publication, was no doubt produced in Filippino's studio. It does not repeat any of the drawings that
she published.
Paul Joannides
Recto, Detail
Pietro Perugino
Città della Pieve ca. 1448 - 1523 Fontignano
8
PROVENANCE:
The Head of Saint James
Charcoal and black chalk with white and red chalk on blue-grey paper, with indented
contours; 333 x 246 mm.
de Mestral de St. Saphorin
Benno Geiger, Venedig
L. V. Rendall, USA
LITERATURE:
Pantheon 1938, Heft 10, Hrsg. Otto v. Falcke, Farbabb. S. 330
Benno Geiger “Handzeichnungen alter Meister”, Amathea Verlag, 1948, Zürich,
S. 9 u. S.17, Kat.-Nr. 5, Tafel 35
Leporini, Auktion Weinmüller München, 14. Okt. 1938, Lot 558, Farbtafel
M.M. Grewenig/O. Letze. Lonardo d Vinci – Künstler, Erfinder, Wissenschaftler,
Historisches Museum der Pfalz, Speyer 1995, S. 23,24
cp. Walter Bombe, 1914, S. 36
EXHIBITION:
Leonardo da Vinci - Künstler, Erfinder, Wissenschaftler,
Historisches Museum der Pfalz, Speyer 1995 -2001
Historisches Museum der Pfalz, Speyer , Deutschland
Kunsthal Rotterdam, Niederlande
Schottenstift Wien, Österreich
Museum of Science, Boston, USA
Singapore Art Museum, Singapur
Seoul Arts Center, Korea
Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, Kanada
Pretoria Art Museum. Pretoria, Südafrika
National Museum of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slowenien
National Museum of History, Taipeh, Taiwan
National Science and Technology Museum, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zürich, Schweiz
This drawing is obviously related to the head of the Saint James at the left of Pietro Perugino's panel of the
Virgin and Child with Saints James and Augustine, signed and dated MCCCCLXXXXIIII, painted for and
still in the church of San Agostino in Cremona. The head seems to be the same size as that in the panel,
and the breadth and freedom of the treatment might suggest that this is a fragment of the cartoon. But it
has not been excised from a larger work. It is rather a type of "auxiliary cartoon", a drawing developing at
the same size a section the full cartoon, to study precisely a significant part of the projected painting.
Unlike the auxiliary cartoons of Raphael, the most famous examples of the genre, which bear the marks of
pouncing, the outlines of this drawing were not carried over from the cartoon proper. Also unlike
Raphael's auxiliary cartoons, which were simply used as models and whose outlines were not transferred to
the panel or canvas to be painted, this auxiliary cartoon was transferred, although not emphatically, to
another surface, as the light indentation of the contours indicates.
This drawing is obviously related to the head of the Saint James at the left of Pietro Perugino's panel of the
Virgin and Child with Saints James and Augustine, signed and dated MCCCCLXXXXIIII, painted for and
still in the church of San Agostino in Cremona. The head seems to be the same size as that in the panel,
and the breadth and freedom of the treatment might suggest that this is a fragment of the cartoon. But it
has not been excised from a larger work. It is rather a type of "auxiliary cartoon", a drawing developing at
the same size a section the full cartoon, to study precisely a significant part of the projected painting.
Unlike the auxiliary cartoons of Raphael, the most famous examples of the genre, which bear the marks of
pouncing, the outlines of this drawing were not carried over from the cartoon proper. Also unlike
Raphael's auxiliary cartoons, which were simply used as models and whose outlines were not transferred to
the panel or canvas to be painted, this auxiliary cartoon was transferred, although not emphatically, to
another surface, as the light indentation of the contours indicates. The explanation of these characteristics
is clear. The figure of Saint Augustine in the Cremona painting is identical in every particular save the head
to the Saint Peter who stands in the same position in Perugino's Virgin and Child with Saints Peter, John
the Evangelist, John the Baptist and Paul, signed and dated MCCCCLXXXXIII, now in the
Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. As noted by Vittoria Garibaldi, 1999, pp.115-6, Perugino,
economical with effort, employed the same figural cartoon in both panels. But since the identity - and
hence the character - of the Saint was changed in the Cremona painting, Perugino needed to make a new
study for the head. In this drawing he created one of his most thoughtfully compassionate types.
After its outlines had been lightly transferred to the panel, this drawing would have been set up
beside it so that the executant of the head, whether Perugino himself or one of his assistants, could employ
it as a guide. This function also accounts for the elaboration of the surface of the flesh and parts of the
beard with coloured chalks - which must be distinguished from the water damage that the sheet has
suffered. This wealth of tone and colour would have provided further guidance for the executant. While
such colouring is unique in the exiguous surviving corpus of Perugino's drawings, it should not be assumed
to be a later addition by another hand. Coloured drawing was much practiced by artists in Northern Italy
under the impact of Leonardo, by whom Perugino too was influenced, and it is not without significance
that in the year the Cremona panel was painted, Perugino spent time in Venice.
A further point to be made is that the vigorous broad lines and stumped areas that lay in the folds
of drapery at the left do not correspond to this area of Saint James' drapery in the panel. Since that drapery
was already provided by the cartoon re-used from the Vienna painting, Perugino here simply sketched it
freely and rapidly to offset the head; and the energy of his handling contributes to the emotion of the
Saint's expression.
The graphic work of Perugino is difficult to reconstruct because few autograph drawings survive in
comparison with the many copies after his paintings (and sometimes lost drawings) by his students.
Although several studies of heads on a scale comparable with this drawing are known, the majority of
these are in metal-point. In contrast with the fine and elaborated surfaces of those drawings - although they
are usually energized and roughened by liberal application of white body colour - the freedom and speed of
handling of the present one reveal the vitality and verve that underlay Perugino's apparently placid style,
and helps explain why he was so successful in the 1480s and 1490s at large scale work. And this drawing
also provides a further insight into Perugino's relations with his greatest and most famous associate.
Raphael employed 'auxiliary' cartoons from very early in his career, at a moment when his work most
closely resembled that of Perugino. Towards the end of his life, when he too had a large studio and many
assistants to control, he too began to employ coloured chalks in facial (and other) studies. It is not by
chance that the next major step in introducing colour to drawings was taken by the Urbinate Federico
Barocci.
Another drawing by Perugino, in white body colour over indications in metal point in the
British Museum, has been connected with the head of Saint James but that drawing shows a head of
distinctly different character on which light falls from the left, not the right (see Scarpellini, 1984, pp.88
and 183, for comparative illustrations).
The present drawing, which is mounted on an 18th century red chalk study of a female head, is to be
included in the catalogue of Perugino’s drawings that Dottoressa Claudia La Malfa has in preparation.
Paul Joannides
Attributed to Baccio della Porta, called Fra Bartolommeo
Florenz 1472 - 1517 Pian di Mugnone
9
Recto: A Female Nude seen from the rear
Verso: A Standing Female Nude seen from the front (Fragmentary)
Recto: Metalpoint on grey ground with white body colour and indications in pen and
ink.
Verso: Black chalk 268 x 99 mm.
Although in recent years it has enjoyed an attribution to Benozzo Gozzoli, this drawing is by
an artist of a later generation. The old inscription giving the drawing to Raphael suggests that it was
made in the late 15th or early 16th century and, with virtual certainty, by a Florentine artist.
As a study of the female nude from the rear, this drawing is a comparative rarity. It evokes
antiquity in the absent arms but they clearly have not been broken and the drawing was no doubt
made after a bronze or wax figure modelled in general emulation of an antique figure rather than
directly after a specific antique statue. It is common to find figurines made with absent arms and
they were much employed for artistic training.
The proportions are elongated, with the legs greatly extended; the right leg placed before the
left suggests that the figure is walking forward, The contours are rather emphatic and unvaried, but
the modelling of the right side of the torso and the right buttock and thigh is achieved by a wellcontrolled application of wash.
Chris Fischer has kindly pointed out that there is a copy of the same figure in a drawing in the
Uffizi (1159E) there given to Baccio della Porta, better known under his monastic name of Fra
Bartolommeo, acquired when he entered the Dominican order in July 1500. Dr. Fischer does not
accept Fra Bartolommeo’s authorship of the Uffizi drawing, although it evidently comes from his
circle. In contrast, it is tempting to think that the present drawing really is by the young Baccio
dealing with an unfamiliar subject in an unfamiliar technique. He is not an artist generally
associated with the female nude, but it is certain that he made nude studies in the 1490s since Vasari
talks of his destroying these in one of the Savonarolan bonfires; even as a Frate he returned to the
theme of the female nude at the end of his life in his design of the Worship of Venus planned for the
Camerino of Alfonso d’Este, but whose execution was interrupted by his death. Although Fra
Bartolommeo largely abandoned metalpoint as a medium on his return to painting in 1504 after his
period of Dominican training, he employed it frequently in drawings made in preparation for his pre1500 paintings, including the Volterra Annunciation and the Last Judgement, as well as for the
Rimini altarpiece.
The fragmentary black chalk study on the verso, inverted with respect to the recto drawing,
shows the same figure, somewhat modified, from the front. It is not placed so that the outlines on the
recto and verso of the sheet coincide, a trick occasionally found at this period, but it is placed to one
side. The chalk sketch somewhat de-feminises the figure and, at first sight, might be taken for a
sketch of a male nude. The swell of the hips is reduced and the single visible breast is so small and
placed so high that it must be the result of a willed stylization. The drawing is very much in the style
of Baccio’s early chalk drawings and it bears a very close relation in style and figural proportions to
the black chalk study in Lille which was probably made for the Saint Sebastian of the altarpiece of
Pandolfo Malatesta in Rimini, a project in which the young Baccio seems to have participated after
the death of Domenico Ghirlandaio in January 1494 (see Fahy, 1966). Like the present verso
drawing, that in Lille is also on the verso of a drawing in metalpoint, another
study for the Rimini altarpiece, It seems likely, therefore that both sides of the present sheet were
drawn in the early to mid-1490s. They may be the young Baccio’s only studies of the female nude to
escape the wave of Puritanism that overtook Florence later in the decade.
It should be noted that Chris Fischer (1994-5, no.1) questioned Baccio’s authorship of the
Lille Saint Sebastian study, but to the compiler the forms of that drawing seem characteristic of his
work. Like the present verso, that in Lill reflects the young artist’s interest in Perugino, at that time
very active in Florence.
Paul Joannides
Assistant of Fra Bartolommeo
Florenz 1472 - 1517 Pian di Mugnone
10
PROVENANCE:
Two MusicalAngels
Niccolò Garburi
Lucien de Parma
These two drawings were copied after studies by Fra Bartolommeo made in preparation for
his great altarpiece, commissioned by Piero Soderini at the end of 1510 to stand in the Sala del Gran
Consiglio in the Palazzo Vecchio, and left at the state of underdrawing when the project was
abandoned on the fall of the Florentine Republic in 1512.
The original of the upper figure survives on a sheet in the Uffizi (470E verso; Fischer, 1986,
no.57) but, as Chris Fischer has kindly confirmed, no original is known of the lower drawing.
However, it too may once have been on 470E which is now fragmentary. The upper figure is the same
size as Fra Bartolommeo’s original and presumably the lower one is too. This, of course, implies that
the present draughtsman had the Frate’s sheet or sheets on the same table.
Fra Bartolommeo had a large workshop and it is conjectural which of his pupils or associates
might have made these copies: Fra Paolino is perhaps the most obvious possibility.
Paul Joannides
Attributed to Giovanni Larciani (The Master of the Kress Landscapes)
1484 -1527?
11
PROVENANCE:
The Virgin and Child adored by the Infant Saint John
Charcoal, 536 x 392 mm.
Viti Antald
Marquesa Antaldi
Guillaum II, König von Holland
Chambe4rs Hall, London, Lugt 551
Flora Koch, London
This cartoon, which cannot be connected with a known painting, bears an old attribution to
Fra Bartolommeo. It reportedly has a Viti-Antaldi provenance, but it bears none of the usual
identifying initials and cannot be found in the early 18th century inventory. If it was in the VitiAntaldi collection, it must have departed before the inventory was made.
Among Baccio's generally accepted works the present composition comes closest to that of the
painting of the Virgin, Child and Saint John in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, of the
late 1490s, the product of a brief leonardesque phase in Baccio’s work. But this design is more
compressed and intense, and although the effect is no doubt enhanced by trimming at the sides, it
must always have had an insistent physicality; the figures fill the space and the fleshiness of the
forms is palpable. And the motif of the infant Saint John kissing the right foot of the Child is rare in
its tactile expression of adoration and unusually intimate: neither in the New York panel nor in any
other work by the Baccio does he touch the Child.
Were the present cartoon by Baccio it would necessarily be contemporary with the New York
panel. But the types and the drapery formation are not those of his early period and the fluent
rhythm of the composition implies the influence of Raphael’s late Florentine-early Roman
Madonnas, particularly in the connection of two children placed at different levels. The head type of
the Virgin and the play of her drapery are reminiscent of the bust-length Madonnas painted by Fra
Bartolommeo towards the end of his life, when he again focused on the theme, but those are much
more majestic and reflect a later moment in Raphael’s development, seen by Fra Bartolommeo on his
visit to Rome in 1514.
In short this cartoon is not by Fra Bartolommeo, as Chris Fischer has kindly confirmed, but
by one of the painters in his circle. Albertinelli can be ruled out, as can Fra Paolino, Bugiardini and
Franciabigio. The author appears rather to be Giovanni Larciani (the Master of the Kress
Landscapes), whose name was recovered only in 1998, by Louis Waldman. The types both of the
children and the Virgin, their characterisations the energy and movement of the arrangement, and
the slightly ungainly intensity of the emotional interaction are very close to the Madonnas discussed
both by Waldman (see, for example, the Virgin and Child with the infant Saint John reproduced as his
Fig.7 as location unknown) and by Elena Capretti (1996; see her no.43, the Virgin and Child with the
infant Saint John in the Deposit of the Uffizi, (Poggio Imperiale, inv.1347). There are also many
points of comparison with Larciani’s documented altarpiece of 1523, the Holy Family with Saints in
the Museo Civico at Fucecchio Larciani’s stylistic trajectory is interesting.
Initially very much affected by the edgy art of Rosso, to whom some of his smaller panels were once
attributed, he later came to conform more closely to the grander, more publicly acceptable manner of
Fra Bartolommeo. Although no other cartoons by Larciani are known, the style of this one, with its
multitude of fine short strokes, echoes that of Rosso’s sharply linear chalk drawings. It is tempting
to think that a drawing in the Uffizi (Inv.6351F), traditionally attributed to Granacci, but which
seems to prepare Larciani’s small Madonna in Arezzo, is by Larciani himself. Although the Uffizi
drawing is much smaller than this cartoon, the hatching and the drapery formation are very similar.
It may be noted that Chris Fischer perceptively situated the present design in the orbit of Granacci.
Paul Joannides
Giovanni Battista Naldini
1537 - Florenz - 1591
12
PROVENANCE:
Kneeling Angel after Andrea del Sarto
Red chalk on red-washed paper; 389 x 290 mm.
Col. W. Bateson, Lugt Suppl. 2604a
This characteristically sleek drawing, with its broad but filamented contours, was made after
the kneeling angel at the right of Andrea del Sarto's Madonna della Scala, executed around 1520 and
universally considered one of his most beautiful paintings. The Madonna della Scala remained in
Florence until 1605 when it was sold to Vincenzo Gonzaga; it was acquired with the Gonzaga
collection by Charles I and is now in the Prado. Naldini no doubt copied the figure directly from the
painting rather than from a preparatory drawing by Andrea, but, concentrating on the figure alone
rather than on the context; the drawing's vivacity and freedom of handling is such that at first sight
it looks more like an original study than a copy.
Naldini's draughtsmanship was profoundly influenced by the drawing styles of the leading
Florentine painters of the 1520s and 1530s, especially Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo, and indeed he
copied many drawings by the latter and a number by the former. Unsurprisingly, some of Naldini’s
drawings have in the past been attributed to Sarto - and vice versa. The breadth of the approach
very much evokes Andrea's chromatic chiaroscuro and Naldini's study of the earlier artist anticipates
the intense revival of interest in Sarto that occurred among Florentine painters of the next
generation, such as Ludovico Cigoli, Cristofano Allori and Matteo Rosselli, among others. However,
while Naldini prepared the break-through into what became Florentine early seicento style, he
himself remained on its verge and never took the further step.
Paul Joannides
RAPHAEL
Raphael (after)
Urbino 1483 - 1520 Rom
13
PROVENANCE:
LITERATURE:
The Virgin
Pen and ink 112 x 116 mm.
Viti Antaldi, L 2245
cp. J.A. Gere. Drawings by Raphael and his circle, New York, 1987, S. 53, Nr.5
This lively sketch of the head and shoulders of the Virgin was attributed to Raphael by the
late John Gere and dated c.1505-8. He compared it with another drawing of the Virgin at bust length
(139 x 136 mm.), close in arrangement to the present one and also bearing the R.V. initials. That
drawing, formerly in the collection of Duke Roberto Ferretti, was exhibited in New York in 1987 as
by Raphael (See Gere, no.5). To the compiler, however, the present drawing seems to be a copy of a
lost study by Raphael. The relation of the pose of the head of the Virgin to that of the Madonna del
Prato (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) of 1505 is clear, but the movement here is more energetic
and suggests a slightly later moment in Raphael's Florentine sojourn, perhaps 1507. The original
may have been done for a full-length seated figure rather than a half-length Madonna, but of this one
cannot be certain. A close parallel for the treatment of the features and the bodice can be found in,
among others, Raphael's pen drawing in the Uffizi, inv. 515E.
The initials at the lower left indicate that this drawing, or the lost original, was once in the
collection of Timoteo Viti. It cannot be identified in the inventory of the Viti-Antaldi collection
which was compiled in the early 18th century but it is clear that many drawings that Timoteo had
owned were disposed of well before that inventory was compiled. Indeed, Vasari himself speaks of
having acquired drawings from Timoteo's son. If the initials are taken on trust, this copy would have
been made before Timoteo's death in 1524. However, such initials are not difficult to duplicate, and
they might have been added later: a draughtsman competent enough to copy one of Raphael's
drawings effectively would have had no difficulty copying the initials. However, while copies after
drawings by Raphael bearing the Viti-Antaldi initials are quite common, it has never been
ascertained whether they - or some of them - were made within Viti's lifetime, or whether they - or
some of them - are later copies of autograph drawings owned by Viti.
In the present case it seems likely that the copy is early. Numerous drawings by Raphael were
available to his friends and contemporaries in Umbria and Florence, and copies were made of some of
them almost immediately, notably by Viti himself. It would be hazardous to guess which of those
friends made the present copy, but it does not seem to be by Timoteo who, even when copying
drawings by Raphael, never attains this level of fluency. It is more likely that it was drawn by an
artist of a younger generation. It is clear that Raphael's own pupils, Giulio Romano and Gian
Francesco Penni, were interested in, and made copies of, some of his Florentine designs even when
they were working with him in Rome, but the present drawing does not seem to be by either of them
and the issue of its authorship remains open. No other versions of this drawing seem to be known and
it is thus a significant addition to the corpus of reproductions of lost drawings by Raphael.
Paul Joannides
Circle of Raphael
14
A Nude Warrior seen from behind
Col. Mariette, L 1787
Lord Pembroke, L 2183
Comte C. G. Tessin, L 2985
LITERATURE: A. Vezzosi in “Raffaello e lìdea della bellezza”, 2001, Bd. 4, S. 29 Nr. 2
PROVENANCE:
EXHIBITON:
Roma Castel Sant`Angelo, 18.12.2001 -17.02.2002
San Benedetto del Tronto, 15.06. 2004 -14.10.2004
Although this drawing was included in the 1775 sale of Pierre-Jean Mariette's collection as by
Raphael, his authorship can be excluded. It would be tempting to relate the subject to that of some
of the pen drawings of battles and the taking of prisoners that Raphael made around of 1507, for an
unidentified project or projects, but perhaps related to the history of Perugia and its siege and
capture by Totilla. But the hatching here is stiffer, broader and more laboured than Raphael's and
the cross-hatching on the buttocks and upper thigh are hardly effective in structuring the form.
It is not impossible that the present drawing might record a lost drawing by Raphael, but the
gestures, both of the left arm bearing the shield and the right arm holding the shaft of presumably, a
spear, are unconvincing. Raphael's anatomical command c.1507 was not as secure as it later became
but, nevertheless, the forms and foreshortening of the nude figure in the present drawing are beneath
Raphael's capacity at that date. The movement of the figure lacks rhythm and the contours are
pedestrian: even in Raphael's most laboured drawings of this kind his nudes are vivified by the wavearcs of the contours.
That Raphael's influence predominates in this drawing is clear, but it is probably by - or after
- an associate or contemporary of the master influenced by Raphael's work of the later Florentine
period. Palace decorations of the period frequently included military subjects and the present figure
could have fitted well into a painted frieze of some Roman subject. A figure loosely resembling this,
but with many differences, is to be found among the stucco reliefs in the vault of the Camera del Sole
e della Luna in Palazzo Te (see Belluzzi, II, p.147, no.287), but dependence is not direct. Since these
stuccoes make use of many motifs from Raphael and others, it may be that both that relief and the
present drawing are approximate reflections of a common source.
Paul Joannides
Raphael (after)
15
PROVENANCE:
Anatomical Studies
Col. J. Grunewald, Lugt Suppl. 1155B
Col. Stehelin NY 1890-1900
This is a copy, perhaps a tracing, of a page in an anatomical sketch-book made by Raphael
towards the end of his Florentine period, of which only one page survives in the Musée des BeauxArts of Lille (Inv. PL.490/ Brejon de Lavergnée, no.559). Although the compiler has doubted the
Lille drawing in the past, he is now inclined to think it autograph. No plausible original survives of
the present drawing but the compiler has seen another copy of it, as well as of others en suite including the Lille drawing - in a private collection. The lost album probably contained around half a
dozen sheets. The watermark in the paper on which the present drawing was made is Briquet 5264, of
around 1520, so it is may be that the anatomical album enjoyed some circulation even before
Raphael's death or, at least, shortly thereafter.
Paul Joannides
Raphael (after)
16
PROVENANCE:
LITERATURE:
EXHIBITON:
‘Palaemon’ from the ‘Triumph of Galatea’
Marc Andre Aunant
de Mestral de St. Saphorin, Wien
A. Vezzosi in „Raffaello e l’idea della bellezza“, 2001, Bd. 4, S. 24, Nr. 1
Roma Castel Sant’Angelo 18.12. 2001 - 17. 02. 2002
San Benedetto del Tronto 15.06 - 14.10. 2004
The Triumph of Galatea was Raphael’s first large-scale mythological painting, frescoed in the
villa (it would be more accurate to say palace) of the great banker Agostino Chigi probably in 1512 as
a companion piece of the Polyphemus of Sebastiano del Piombo. Its amplitude of sensuous form,
combined with a strongly sculptural modeling and a rigoruous geometrical composition (famously
analysed by Heinrich Wölfflin), provided a Roman reply to the broader and looser sensuousness of
the Venetian school. But the joyful expression of youth, beauty and love animates and warms the
figures, making the fresco one of the most memorable that Raphael painted, and a model for
countless later artists, including those who could never have seen the original, such as Paolo
Veronese. It was no doubt the success of this fresco that encouraged Agostino to commission form
Raphael the scenes from the story of Cupid and Psyche, frescoed in the adjoining loggia some five
years later (one of the figures from which was copied in the drawing in this exhibition attributed to
Innocenzo da Imola).
The present copy, which is very accomplished, extracts just the infant Palaemon from the
base of the composition. Unlike most other copies it shows the child’s parted lips and his teeth, and it
was presumably made directly from the fresco, rather than from another drawing. This suggests an
artist with sufficient reputation to gain access to a private palace. The concentration on a detail
taken from a larger scheme, the great precision of the drawing, and the use of sharp red chalk, recall
the copies of modern works made in Rome in the early 1530s by Francesco Salviati. But the present
drawing lacks Salviati’s variety and vivacity of touch and the drawing cannot be attributed to him.
Vasari records that when, as young artists, he and Salviati shared lodgings in Rome, each copied as
many major paintings as possible, and they then copied each other’s copies. It might, therefore, be
tempting to give this copy to Vasari, whose work in red chalk in the early 1530s is less well-known
that that of his friend. But precise links to his work are lacking and at present it would be safer to
leave the drawing in anonymity, while suggesting that it probably was made in the 1530s.
Paul Joannides
Circle of Raphael
17
Hagar and the Angel?
PROVENANCE:
Col. C. R. Rudolf
LITERATURE:
EXHIBITION:
Showing a woman carrying a flagon, with her strong and ample body visible beneath her
wind-blow drapery, this study, was presumably inspired by the magnificent woman with a vase on
her head at the right-hand side of Raphael's Fire in the Borgo in the Stanza del Incendio in the
Vatican.
However, the subject here is clearly not the same and the countryside setting and the angel
who appears upper left, seemingly conversing with the woman, suggests that what is represented is
the Old Testament episode of Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness. Abandoned, without sustenance,
her young son Ishmael dying of thirst, the distraught Hagar is rescued by an angel who guides her to
a hidden spring.
The artist is not identifiable. Perino's name has been suggested but the drawing is not by him.
Nor, although it shows some familiarity with Raphael's very direct style of pen-drawing, is it either
by or after Raphael. However, something of the loose vigour of pen-handling in the present sketch,
and the rather ambitious if clumsy approach to form, might indicate an occasional associate of
Raphael such as Sodoma (cf. his scene of a Possessed Woman in the Uffizi, Inv. 565E), although he is
not known to have treated the subject of Hagar.
It should be recorded that Professor Konrad Oberhuber, Dr. Christel Thiem and Dr. Albert
Schug all attributed this drawing to Raphael.
Paul Joannides
Workshop of Giulio Romano after Raphael
Rom 1499 - 1546 Mantua
18
PROVENANCE:
The Victory at Ostia
Pen and ink, with light brown wash; 422 x 687 mm.
Col. Fürst Liechtenstein
This large drawing is a full and accurate copy after the fresco in the Stanza del Incendio of the
Vatican, probably executed in 1515, by an unidentified hand or hands to Raphael's design. It was
certainly made after the fresco, not after a modello for it. The drawing's style is very much that of
Giulio Romano, but not, it must be noted, his style at the moment that the fresco was executed. It
shows the clean linearity and the light-toned washes that characterise the drawings that he made
after Raphael's death, a style that became predominant in his Mantuan work.
It seems clear, as suggested elsewhere in this catalogue, that Giulio either himself made copies
or had copies executed, of many of the projects with which he was or had been involved. This was
certainly the case with his Mantuan schemes and he may well have extended it to those paintings on
which he had collaborated with Raphael in Rome - and perhaps works of the Raphael studio
generally.
While the present drawing, which is in poor condition, does not seem to be by Giulio himself,
it is patently in his style, and may either have been made by an assistant on his behalf shortly before
he left Rome in 1524, or be the replica of a now-lost copy made by Giulio himself.
Paul Joannides
Detail
Detail
Gian Francesco Penni (after)
Florenz ca 1488 - ca. 1530 Neapel
19
The Crossing of the Red Sea
Brush and wash with white body colour over black chalk; 170 x 282 mm.
This is a copy, a little smaller than the original, complete with squaring, of the modello by
Penni, now in the Louvre (Inv.3850; Cordellier and Py no.694; brush and wash with white body
colour over black chalk; 201 x 285 mm.), for the scene of the Crossing of the Red Sea in the 8th bay of
the Loggia. It is probable that the modello was based on sketches by Raphael, which Penni then
developed, but this or these do not survive.
The present copy is so exact that one might think it a contemporary replica - it seems to have
been customary to make two redactions of modelli, one for the artist, one for the patron, and Raphael
would obviously have required either Penni's modello or a copy of it so that he could monitor the
executing artist's accuracy. But the rather emphatic contours differ from those of the original, and
the employment of white body colour is so different in character, fuller and more voluptuous, that
the drawing is no doubt a replica, made either to deceive or, perhaps, to be retained in some owner's
collection on the sale of the original. The watermark, which seems to be of the 17th century, would
support this view.
The earliest recorded provenance of the Louvre original is the collection of Pierre Crozat, but
many of his drawings came from Everard Jabach, and Jabach commissioned many copies of
drawings in his possession, whether as accurate records of precious but fragile objects, or with
fraudulent intention. It is no more than conjecture, but the present drawing may have been among
them
Paul Joannides
Pirro Ligorio or circle after Gian Francesco Penni after Raphael
Neapel ca. 1510 - 1583 Ferrara
20
a: Cain and Abel (Vatican Loggia: Second bay)
b: Joseph Revealing Himself to his Brothers (Vatican Loggia: Seventh bay)
c: Bathsheba interceding with David in favour of her son Solomon (Vatican Loggia:
Eleventh bay)
d: A Petitioner before Solomon (Vatican Loggia: Twelfth bay)
Pen and ink with brown wash and white body colour on blue grounded paper; the
dimensions vary from 75-85 x 235-240 mm.
PROVENANCE:
William H. Schab Gallery
LITERATURE:
EXHIBITION:
These drawings are in an unusual colour and technique that seems to be indebted to Polidoro,
for example his astonishing drawing of the Betrayal of Christ in the Royal Collection (See Clayton,
2001, no.61). They reproduce four of the eleven episodes from the Old Testament frescoed in grisaille
in the dado of the Vatican Loggia; a fifth copy in the same technique and with the same dimensions
(75 x 240 mm), after the Gathering of Manna in the eighth bay is in the British Museum
(1946.7.13.604*). It is likely that the series of copies was once complete. A further copy that seems to
be related and might well have been produced by the same artist or the same studio is in the
Ashmolean Museum (Parker no.661): it also reproduces Bathsheba interceding with David in favour of
Solomon but, at 130 x 390 mm., it is on a larger scale than any of the present group.
The few surviving preparatory drawings for the dado grisailles are by Gian Francesco Penni
who was no doubt working under the relaxed supervision of Raphael. Polidoro is often credited with
the frescoes' execution but no judgement about their authorship can be more than speculative,
because very little survives of the originals and they can be studied only indirectly.
These copies were probably executed in three or four horizontal strips across the pages of a
substantial album and were later divided. Two of the sheets carry compass-drawn circles on their
versos, some of which are truncated by the edges, which implies that the pages were complete when
the circles were executed. Such circles could well have been made as matrices for copies antique coins
- which implies that the draughtsman had antiquarian interests. This inference perhaps accounts for
the drawings previous and unsustainable attribution to Baldassare Peruzzi. But the style of these
copies which show rather snout-like faces and heavy forms, suggests a link with the obsessive
antiquarian Pirro Ligorio who was deeply interested in Polidoro's work and whose drawings have
sometimes been mistaken for his. If the present drawings are not by Pirro himself, they are likely to
have been produced in his circle.
Paul Joannides
Attributed to Innocenzo da Imola after Raphael
Imola zw.1490-94 - zw.1547-1550 Bologna
21
Psyche Returning from the Styx
Black chalk with brush and wash and white body colour; 269 x 154 mm.
This copy was made after one of the most famous pendentive figures in Raphael’s Psyche
Loggia in Agostino Chigi’s villa, now know as the Farnesina, on the lungotevere. The loggia, whose
decoration was never completed, was executed largely by Raphael’s pupils, mainly in 1517.
The present copy, which may well be indirect, somewhat elongates and simplifies Raphael’s
figure, diminishing its physical substance in favour of a linear elegance. It also modifies the original
in that the figure is seen from a level around her knee, rather than from below. The technique is
similar to that employed by at least two of those Emilian artists who demonstrated intense interest
in Raphael’s work in the early 1520s – Biagio Pupini and Bartolommeo Bagnacavallo – but the
transformations of Raphael’s design, which seem to be both motivated and visually intelligent,
suggest the most devoted Raphaeliser of the period in Emila, Innocenzo da Imola. The modified
drapery style with its enhanced accentuation of smoothly running folds, is particularly characteristic
of his style.
Paul Joannides
Raphael or Giulio Romano (after)
22
Study for “The Holy Family of Francis I”
Red chalk, 171 x 128 mm.
PROVENANCE:
Fürst Liechtenstein
LITERATURE:
cp. Knab, Mitsch, Oberhuber. Raphael: Die Zeichnungen, 1983, Nr. 568
Early in 1518 Raphael was commissioned to execute an elaborate Holy Family as a gift for
Francis I, king of France, where it was exported later that year. Signed and dated MDXVIII, it is
now in the Louvre, having suffered from from a transfer from panel to canvas in the late 18th
century.
Three secure preparatory drawings survive for the painting. The earliest is the sketch in the
Louvre (Inv.3862; red chalk; 173 x 118 mm.) no doubt made from the live model, for the inclining
Virgin. It is this sketch that is copied on the present sheet. A much more developed study for the
Virgin, now shown in her fine robes, is in the Uffizi (Inv.535E); also in the Uffizi is study of the Child
straining upwards into her arms (Inv.534E). All three are in red chalk A fourth drawing in Haarlem,
although it has also been connected with the Psyche Loggia, is probably, as Shearman suggested, a
study for the saintly witness on the left and the angel scattering flowers above him/her, and
somewhat different in form from the painted version (Inv.A68). Finally, two fragments of what
seems to have been the cartoon survive, one in Melbourne, the other in Bayonne; but these may be
fragments of a copy rather than then original.
The two drawings in the Uffizi, and that in Haarlem are unanimously given to Raphael
himself and one would expect that the preliminary study in the Louvre also to be by him. But
although many scholars have indeed given it to Raphael, others - including this writer - believe it to
be by Giulio (for a survey of opinion see Cordellier and Py, no.875). The heaviness of the contours
and the unconvincing perspective of the leg, which seems to slide across the surface of the paper,
signal his hand, as does the young woman's slightly unfocused gaze, unsure quite how to respond to
the bolster in her arms. Vasari informs us that the painting was in part executed by Giulio Romano
and it seems that Giulio's participation extended to assisting Raphael in the preparatory stages, as in
other projects.
The present drawing is an accomplished copy, virtually a facsimile, of Louvre 3862. It might
have been drawn in Mantua, where Giulio transferred in 1524 and where he spent the remaining
twenty-two years of his life. Giulio ran a large workshop in Mantua in which, it is clear, there was
much copying of his drawings. Copies might have been made for any number of reasons, ranging
from student exercises to the establishment of archives. That large numbers of copies exist of Giulio's
Mantuan drawings suggests that his workshop systematically made ricordi.
This copy might, therefore, have been made by one of his Mantuan assistants but there are
other possibilities. For example Francesco Primaticcio, who worked for a while with Giulio in the
Palazzo Te, seems to have taken a number of drawings by Giulio with him when he moved to France,
probably gifts from the master to a favoured associate. The Louvre drawing might have been among
them and it could well have remained from that time onwards in France, where it is first recorded in
the possession of Jacques Stella. It is not to be excluded therefore that the present copy was made in
France, Alternatively, red chalk drawings by or believed to be by Raphael were copied from an early
date in Central Italy, by artists identified (such as Francesco Salviati) and unidentified. However,
although the sheet bears no watermark, the type of the paper suggests to the compiler that this copy
is early, and probably was made in Italy.
Paul Joannides
Giorgio Vasari
Arezzo 1511 - 1574 Florenz
23
PROVENANCE:
The Holy Family
Pen and ink with white body colour on light purple prepared ground; 342 x 253 mm.
Bernhard Houthakker, Amsterdam, Auktions-Kat. 1955, Nr. 40 (as Parmigianino)
During the first half of the 1540s, the probable date of this drawing, Vasari executed several
paintings that resemble it in various ways, but none that survives follows it directly. The closest is a
fresco, destroyed during the Second World War, formerly in the convent of Santa Margherita in
Arezzo.
Throughout this period Vasari was considering closely the panel paintings of Raphael, and
the present design is obviously dependent from one of Raphael's most famous and influential
Madonnas, his so-called Madonna di Loreto (Musée Condé, Chantilly) which was very much
replicated. But Vasari may also have looked at the Roman work of Giulio Romano for the interior
setting.
The purple ground is unusual for Vasari but it was employed by his friend Agnolo Bronzino at
this period and it creates an effect of great richness and refinement. Both the composition and the
details of the characterisations have a tenderness and sympathy often diluted in Vasari's finished
paintings. Perhaps the closest to it in spirit is the 1541 panel of the Holy Family with Saint Francis,
also heavily indebted to Raphael, now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
There is a copy of this drawing in the Louvre (Inv.2232; see Monbeig-Goguel, 1972, no.169,
pen and ink over black chalk with brown wash and white body colour on blue paper; 375 x 286 mm.)
which probably comes from Vasari's studio. In her entry, Madame Monbeig-Goguel records the
present drawing, which was known to her from its appearance in a sale in Amsterdam in 1955, as the
original.
Paul Joannides
Attributed to Federico Barocci
ca. 1535 - Urbino - 1612
24
Recto: The Virgin and Child with the young Saint John
Verso: The Virgin and Child; two standing male figures.
Recto and verso: Pen and ink; 141 x 101 mm.
The present sheet, which has been cut down to frame the recto group, was attributed to
Federico Barocci some years ago by the late Professor Konrad Oberhuber, one of the greatest of
recent connoisseurs of Italian drawings.
It is clear that both sides of the sheet are heavily indebted to Raphael whose work Barocci
studied closely and whose practice of elaborate preparation he followed to, at times, obsessive
lengths. Both sides look to work of Raphael’s Florentine rather than his Roman period. Perhaps this
was the consequence of Barocci’s residence in Urbino, and his practice in Umbria and the Marches,
where it was Raphael’s pre-Roman work that was most familiar and most valued.
The recto group is obviously a free variant on Raphael’s 1505-1507 trio of seated Madonnas –
the Prato, the Cardellino and the Belle Jardiniêre – while the group at the upper left of the verso
recalls, without echoing, the more mobile manner of the Florentine half-lengths of 1507-8, the
Bridgewater and the Large Cowper. The draughtsman’s knowledge of Raphael’s work might not have
been confined to his paintings; he may also have been aware of, and inspired by, his drawings:
Urbino contained a large group of early drawings by Raphael which, in Barocci’s lifetime, were in the
possession of the family of Raphael’s friend Timoteo Viti. Even the two nude male figures at the
lower right of the verso, clumsy though they are, may register knowledge of some of the scenes of
nude combat dating from c.1507, examples of which were certainly owned by Viti.
However, it is wise to sound a note of caution. Although there is a relation in the rather broad
pen lines, and the apparently characteristic pentiment of the Virgin’s head on the recto, to some of
Barocci’s early studies of the Madonna such as Uffizi 11562F and 11560F, and to a somewhat later
one such as Uffizi 1412E (Emiliani, figs. 71, 74 and 154 respectively) and 1415 F (Olsen, 1962, fig.74),
the present sheet does not display the vitality and energy of those drawings. Nor can figures as
awkward as the male nudes on the verso be found elsewhere in Barocci’s graphic oeuvre. Thus, while
Professor Oberhuber’s judgements should be treated with the greatest respect, an element of doubt
exists in this case.
Paul Joannides
recto
verso
Federico Barocci
ca. 1535 - Urbino - 1612
25
The Head of Saint Joseph for the Louvre Circumcision
Black, red and white chalk with charcoal and touches of ochre pastel on faded blue
paper; 235 x 177 mm.
PROVENANCE:
F. Dubini/Rasini, Mailand L 987a
LITERATURE:
cp. Albertina, Wien, Kat. A. Emiliani „F.B.“ Bologna 1985, S. 259, fig. 5461
It was Federico Barocci who took to an extreme point the practice, seen in Raphael’s
auxiliary cartoons – and in the present exhibition in Perugino’s head of Saint James - of making
same-size highly-detailed studies of the heads and hands of the more important – and sometimes the
less important – actors in his paintings. He extended their example to include multi-coloured chalks,
although he rarely attempted full colouristic naturalism, even in portraits.
It is Barocci’s place in an historic succession in which Perugino and Raphael were major
figures, that is the justification for the inclusion of this drawing in the present catalogue. It is a study
for the head of Saint Joseph, who kneels at the right margin of the composition, in the Circumcision
now in the Louvre. The painting was commissioned in 1583 and completed in 1590 and placed on the
high altar of the church of the Nome di Gesù in Pesaro. Taken to Paris in 1797 it was never returned.
The present drawing was first published in 1937 by Antonio Morassi (no.XLIV) who
suggested that it was made for a head of Saint Joseph or a shepherd in an Adoration. It was later
linked with the Circumcision by Olsen (1962). In 1978, Edmund Pillsbury noted that it followed on
from a study in black and white chalks only in the Uffizi (11398F) and was very closely connected
with another, in the E.B. Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento, California, inv. 1871.234. The Crocker
drawing (Black, red and white chalks with charcoal, coloured with touches of pink and ochre pastels,
on blue paper, 252 x 204 mm.) is clearly after the same model as the present one, but in it the features
have been softened, somewhat idealized, and simplified – for example the ear is omitted. Pillsbury’s
discussion (p.81) lays out the situation clearly:
“The Uffizi drawing and the Sacramento drawing, appear to have been done on the basis of
the figure represented in the full-scale cartoon preserved in the Uffizi [Emiliani, fig.526]. In the
chiaroscuro modello, executed later to study the lighting, which is also in the Uffizi [Emiliani,
fig.525], the physiognomy and pose of the saint take on their final form. Two coloured chalk
drawings, a small one in the Rasini Collection [the present drawing] and a larger more developed one
in the Albertina (Emiliani, fig.546], document the figure’s transformation from a balding man with a
round face and stubble beard to a white-haired slightly older man with a thin face and long flowing
beard. It is rare for Barocci to make so many drawings of the same head, particularly large-scale
coloured ones like those for Joseph, but the importance of the figure in the overall composition as the
concluding link in the informal movement into space along a serpentine path may have justified the
attention devoted to the head in this case.” [Compiler’s parentheses and inserts].
Pillsbury noted the indebtedness to drawings in coloured chalks by Jacopo Bassano and his
“concern for the material quality of colour which is unlike that of the drawings of any Central Italian
artists of the time…” but the formal strength and solidity of this drawing and that in Sacramento
are
much more evident than in drawings by Jacopo Bassano and reveal the Romano-Florentine substratum of Barocci’s figural style.
Barocci may have returned to the present and the Crocker drawing when he came to study the
the head of the kneeling figure on the right hand side of the slightly later Madonna della Gatta, now
lost but known from a copy in a Bolognese private collection (See Emiliani, pp.284ff.). Indirectly,
this link with a painting that is, in effect, a modified Adoration, provides retrospective support for
Morassi’s intuitive identification.
In 1998 it was suggested by Matteo Lafranconi that the present drawing, of whose then
location he was unaware but which he knew from a photograph (his fig. 33), was that recorded in the
posthumous inventory of 1603 of the Roman sixteenth century collector, Antonio Tronsarelli. The
relevant entry in the Tronsarelli inventory (Lafranconi, p.526 no.24) reads as follows: “Un quadretto
in carta sopra tela de una testa di un vecchio che ride de pastelli di mano del Barosio (Barocci) con un
cornice di legno tinto di nero”. If Lafranconi is correct in this identification, the present drawing
would have left Barocci’s possession well before his death: he may even have made a gift of it to
Tronsarelli.
Paul Joannides
THE LEADING FOLLOWERS OF RAPHAEL
GIULIO ROMANO AND HIS CIRCLE
Giulio Romano
26
The Visitation
Dark brown wash and white body colour on grey preparation; pounced; 279 x 177 mm.
PROVENANCE:
Comte A. F. Andreossy Lugt 119
LITERATURE:
EXHIBITION:
This composition is obviously a close relative of the Visitation in the Prado, executed by
Raphael's studio for his friend Giovanni Battista Branconio dell Aquila at an uncertain date but
probably around 1518. The signature and the inscription to Branconio's father, Marino, on the Prado
painting are not contemporary but were added later, and it is improbable that the panel was passed
off to Branconio as an autograph work. Raphael no doubt played some part in its design, but to
what extent cannot be established since no drawings survive for the picture. The main executant of
the panel - which was transferred to canvas when it was taken to France during the Napoleonic wars
- seems to have been Gian Francesco Penni, but it is likely that Giulio painted the heads of Saint
Elizabeth and the Virgin.
The present drawing, which is densely pounced, modifies the design of the Prado painting in
various ways and no doubt derives from it rather than precedes it. It is so close in style and handling,
and its coloured paper, to a drawing of the Annunciation in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford - also
densely pounced - that it can confidently be attributed to the same hand (Parker, no. 748; dark
brown wash and white body colour on grey preparation; 308 x 205 mm.). In Sir Karl Parker's
Ashmolean catalogue this Annunciation is given to Tommaso Vincidor with a question mark; but it
is much more confident and imaginative in composition than anything by Vincidor, who was not an
inventive artist, and the figures are constructed and modelled with a precision far greater than his.
The Oxford drawing was engraved by Jacopo Caraglio at the same size, probably in the 1520s,
as by Raphael, but the overly-mobile design can hardly be Raphael's, nor can the drawing’s
handling. In fact it seems characteristic in style of Giulio. Although his bright pen and wash style is
more familiar, dense multi-media drawings on coloured grounds are not infrequent in his work,
especially in the 1520s, when his variety of graphic approach was greater than it became during his
Mantuan period.
It seems most likely that the present drawing and that in the Ashmolean, both representing
scenes from the life of the Virgin, and no doubt others that have not come down to us, were made in
preparation for small panels or, perhaps more likely, embroideries on an ecclesiastical vestment,
which the very full pouncing would suggest. They may date to within Raphael's life time, or if not,
certainly before Giulio's departure for Mantua.
Although the present drawing is not in good condition it has not been overworked whereas the
white body colour in the Oxford drawing has been extensively reinforced. It may be that the two
drawings were once the same size, but the dimensions of scenes on different parts of ecclesiastical
vestments often differed according to their placements, and the present sizes may be original.
Support for the view that this drawing has not been cut down is provided by a copy of it in the
Louvre, Inv. 3933 (Cordellier and Py, no.439). This copy, which was attributed by Philip Pouncey
to Biagio Pupini is, at 369 x 192 mm., somewhat larger than our original, but it includes nothing
that is not in it.
Paul Joannides
Giulio Romano
27
PROVENANCE:
Design for Metalwork?
Pen and ink with brown wash; 283 x 215 mm.
Col. August Grahl, Lugt 1199
As was first recognized by the late Professor Konrad Oberhuber, this drawing seems to be by
Giulio Romano rather than a member of his studio. Although the contours are rather harder than is
usual in Giulio's drawings, the delicacy of the washes and the subtlety of their application are very
much his.
The scene represented seems to be the triumphal coronation by a winged Victory of an
armoured young hero, but whether this is allegorical, or the record of some military victory is
unclear. The small figures on the surround clearly represent three of the signs of the zodiac, Leo,
Libra and Aquarius: the first two seem to be fused with the virtues of Prudence and Fortitude; the
third, possibly, with Abundance. However, the compiler has been unable to elucidate this scene
further, or find a source for it.
It may be presumed that this drawing is a design for a metal-work object of some kind, but
the the shape is extremely difficult to decipher. The shadows on the rippling scroll serve to indicate
its movement in space, and the figures cast shadows on the inside of the curving form that surrounds
them from which it may be inferred that the forms were to be executed in relief, perhaps within a
'cell', like a cloisonné enamel. The zodiacal figures at the left and base could well have been embossed
on the exterior of the presumed rim or cell, but it is hard to see how the right-hand figure could be
integrated into such a construction. Indeed, the compiler cannot make a plausible reconstruction of
the three-dimensional form of the object. If it is a handle of some kind, it is difficult to see how it
could have been used and its function is elusive. The sickle and the horn(?) held by the two
supporting figures in the main scene, in addition to whatever their iconographic signification may be,
have a clear formal relation to the overall shape that dominates the field: linear play of this kind is
common in Giulio's work.
The figure style and the elongation of the forms suggest a date around 1530, perhaps
contemporary with the execution of the Sala dei Stucchi in the Palazzo Te.
Paul Joannides
Workshop of Giulio Romano after Giulio Romano
28
PROVENANCE:
The Donation of Constantine
Pen and ink, with light brown wash; 345 x 541 mm.
Col. Fürst Liechtenstein
This is an accurate, if badly damaged, copy of the fresco designed and executed by Giulio
Romano and Gian Francesco Penni in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican, no doubt between late
1523 and mid-1524. However, it omits the framing figures at the edges, which were entirely the
responsibility of Penni, who also made the relevant part of the preparatory drawing for the righthand portion, now in the Ashmolean Museum (Parker, no.248).
The present drawing, like the copy of the Victory at Ostia, is very much in the style of Giulio
Romano but it is not by him. It provides further evidence that Giulio commissioned copies of work
with which he had been involved made by assistants trained in his style of drawing. It is especially
notable that in this drawing the figures painted by Penni were excluded; it suggests that when Giulio
had this copy made, he was interested only in his own work.
It seems that Giulio endeavoured to write Penni out of the history of the Raphael workshop
when he spoke to Vasari and coolness between Raphael's two artistic heirs may have arisen even
before Giulio left Rome in 1524. It became manifest three or four years later: according to Vasari,
Penni was given the cold shoulder when, after the sack of Rome, he arrived in Mantua seeking work
from his erstwhile comrade and collaborator.
Paul Joannides
Biagio Pupini after Giulio Romano
vor 1511- Bologna - nach 1575
29
PROVENANCE:
A Satyr Teased by Two Nymphs
White body colour with indications in pen and ink; 176 x 232 mm.
Col. Brophy
The pictorial handling of this drawing is characteristic of Pupini's work. It seems at first sight
to have been made after an antique relief, but it is fact after an imitation of such a relief designed by
Giulio Romano, that great assimilator of the antique, in whose work Pupini was deeply interested.
The scene occurs in the Camera di Ovidio in Palazzo Te and is datable to 1527 (Belluzzi, II, p.104,
fig.122). Pupini certainly made other copies in Palazzo Te but the full extent of his copying there is
yet to be investigated.
Paul Joannides
Giulio Romano (after)
30
Psyche Wafted over the Sea by Zephyr
Pen and ink with brown wash and white body colour; traces of squaring in black chalk;
263 x 280 mm.
LITERATURE:
EXHIBITION:
This is an accurate copy after one of the most beautiful ceiling compartments in the Sala di
Psiche, among the earliest rooms in the Palazzo Te executed by Giulio after his move to Mantua. The
virtuosic foreshortening of the scenes in the ceiling is an evident homage to Mantegna, the supreme
master of foreshortening in the quattrocento and Giulio's most exalted predecessor in Mantua, on
whom he seems to have, in part, modelled himself. Given that Mantegna was the artist that
Raphael's own father, Giovanni Santi admired most, and that Mantegna as a court artist,
archeologist and design expert, was a reference point for Raphael, it is no surprise that, working in an
artistic environment that Mantegna had made his own, Giulio chose to measure himself against the
great artists that Mantua had possessed. The ceiling may also reveal a degree of competition with
Correggio, of whose contemporary work in San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma Giulio would surely
have been aware.
Their skill and daring have made these compartments particularly irresistible to copyists and
the present episode was one of the most popular: Rubens made a fine copy of it which was formerly in
the Ellesmere Collection. The present drawing seems to be quite early and was no doubt made by one
of Giulio's numerous Mantuan assistants. In the compiler’s view, however, it was made after the
fresco and is not a preliminary study for it, as the late Professor Konrad Oberhuber was inclined to
think.
Paul Joannides
Workshop of Giulio Romano
31
PROVENANCE:
Sections from the vault of The Sala dei Giganti
a: Black chalk with touches of pen and ink and light brown wash plus traces of red
chalk framing; 271 x 470 mm.
b: Black chalk with touches of pen and ink and light brown wash plus traces of red
c: Black chalk with touches of pen and ink and light brown wash plus traces of red
Col. Borghese
These drawings show three sections of the outer section of the vaulted ceiling of the Sala dei
Giganti, the most spectacular and most famous room in the Palazzo Te. Taken together the three
cover about half the ceiling, and their curved forms indicate that they were part of a series, which,
joined into a circle, showed the figure-design of the vault complete. Two of the drawings are
continuous (c and a: the right edge of the former joins the left edge of the latter) but the third is not,
and there must originally have been three companions of comparable size. The central section of the
vault, comprising a ‘parasol’ vault seen da sotto in sù, was no doubt included on yet another sheet,
which would have been placed the centre of the circle formed by the outer six.
The style of these drawings is close to that of Giulio but they are certainly not by him. They
were presumably executed by one of his assistants to record his inventions. They are very close in
form and detail to the vault as executed, but slight differences of characterisation and spacing
suggest that they were copied not after the fresco but after Giulio's modelli. Indeed, the coverage of c
is virtually identical with that of Giulio's single surviving modello of the vault, in the Louvre
(Inv.3476; pen and ink over back chalk with brown wash and white body colour; 502 x 920 mm), but
the scale is half that of Giulio's original.
These drawings are not creative nor do they show signs of any transfer procedure such as
pouncing, indentation or squaring. Their forms are not executed with Giulio's vitality and alertness.
But their quality is high and they document further Giulio's practice, discussed elsewhere in this
catalogue, of preserving (and presumably commissioning) copies both of his paintings and his
drawings.
Giulio's follower Ippolito Andreassi made many copies after Giulio's compositions in the
Palazzo Te and the Palazzo Ducale for Jacopo Strada - and perhaps for Giulio himself, but these
drawings do not seem to be by him.
Paul Joannides
Girolamo da Carpi
ca. 1501 - Frerra - 1556
32
PROVENANCE:
Figure studies for an “Abduction of Europa”
Col. August Grahl, L 1199
This is a characteristic page by Girolamo da Carpi, whose pen style was very much influenced
by that of Giulio Romano and many of whose drawings were in the past attributed to Giulio. Rather
than a copy, it seems be an original composition or, perhaps, compositions, since it is not fully clear
whether the winged figure at the left is, or is not, part of the main scene.
The figures at the right appear to be acting out the episode of Europa's abduction by Jupiter
in the form of a Bull; the Bull's hind-quarters are visible at the right and the drapery fluttering out
above it is that of Europa. The figure-types, poses and expressions are clearly indebted to Giulio
Romano, by whom Girolamo was much influenced, and the conception may have been affected by
the stucco of the same subject in the Camera delle Aquile in Palazzo Te (Belluzzi, II, p.349).
Paul Joannides
Girolamo da Carpi after an unidentified prototype
ca. 1501 - Frerra - 1556
33
Saint John
Pen and ink over traces of black chalk; 131 x 81 mm.
.
These two small studies were made after the same painted figure, no doubt a mourning Saint
John in a Crucifixion. The figure was studied as a whole at the left, with the outlines of the drapery
firmly established and the relief indicated broadly. It was then re-drawn at the right, to a slightly
enlarged scale, with the head omitted but the draperies modelled in more detail. The source was
probably a work of the early cinquecento, perhaps Umbrian, as the pot-hook folds in drapery might
suggest, but the source is elusive. There may well be some Northern influence in the form.
Girolamo da Carpi was a prolific copyist but most of his published copies were made after the
antique or after figures in the works of modern masters like Michelangelo and Raphael. He generally
isolated figures from the compositions in which they occurred. The technique of the present drawing
is very like that of one in the British Museum; see Gere and Pouncey no.158 recto. Although Giulio
Romano was the primary artistic influence on Girolamo’s pen style, here he seems to show some
knowledge of the pen work of Perino del Vaga, whose drawings he is might have seen during one of
his stays in Rome.
Paul Joannides
Girolamo da Carpi after unidentified prototypes
ca. 1501 - Frerra - 1556
34
Recto: Ceres?
Verso: A Mourning Figure?
LOAN
The recto figure appears to represent Ceres. It does not seem to have been made after a
classical statue, but it may have been extracted from a relief. The compiler has, however, found no
other version of this figure among Girolamo’s copies.
The verso sketch presumably represents a mourning figure in a Calvary. The figure appears to
be female, judging by the drapery, and she is probably one of the Virgin’s companions. The drawing
is no doubt a copy, perhaps made after a painting similar to the one that inspired the previous
drawing.
Paul Joannides
recto
verso
Aurelio Luini
ca. 1530 - Milan – 1993
35
Study for four figures of apostles, c. 1585/93
Pen and ink with brush and wash, and touches of red chalk; ?x ? mm.
LOAN
This drawing, in which the figures are seen from the appropriately low angle, is a preliminary
study for the large Pentecost frescoed by Aurelio Luini in the apse of SS. Gervaso e Protaso in Trezzo
sull’Adda, northeast of Milan. Although the exact date of the painting is uncertain, it was probably
executed towards the early 1590s, following the church’s upgrade to parish in 1578 and the order for
a new altar of 1583 (Bora 1982). The fresco demonstrates Aurelio’s mastery of a mature style, open
to up-to-date artistic influences such as those of the Campi, to whom the fresco was traditionally
attributed (Moretti 1933, p.55; see also Mulazzani, 1998, pp.207-9). It naturally contains echoes of
the work of Giulio Romano.
In the context of Aurelio’s draughtsmanship this new drawing is significant, since he is best
known as a prolific executant of free sketches and rapidly drawn primi pensieri which, however, can
rarely be linked with his paintings. In contrast, this sheet shows Aurelio’s mind at work in an
intermediate phase of the preparatory process. He has already grasped the compositional scheme,
but is still playing with the arrangement of the figures, and is as yet unconcerned with their exact
anatomy and physiognomy. He first drew the pair of figures on the left of the sheet, who correspond
to two apostles appearing on the left of the painting. He then sketched the pair of apostles at the
right, although he did not include them in the fresco. Then, he followed by emphasizing the volumes
with wash and touches of red chalk, in a modulated chiaroscuro. The draperies and postures here
faithfully correspond to those that he painted, but in the fresco facial expressions are more strongly
characterized. In the latest preparatory stages Aurelio no doubt turned to his portfolios of head
studies to define facial types in detail.
The emphatic movements of the figures and their eloquent gestures communicate a deep
emotional and spiritual involvement in the sacred event. As is typical of Aurelio’s work, the
Pentecost is intensely animated and densely populated. This strength was admired by Aurelio’s friend
and fellow artist Giovan Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1592), who wrote:“...ha dipinto, in poco spacio, gran
quantità di figure per forza di quell’arte, con la quale egli par essere nato…”. “… he painted, in little
space, a great quantity of figures in virtue of that art with which it seems he was born…”(Lomazzo,
ed.Ciardi 1973, p.369).
Lucia Tantardini
PERINO DEL VAGA
Perino del Vaga
Florenz 1501 - 1547 Rom
36
PROVENANCE:
Calvary
Pen and ink over traces of black chalk; 253 x 194 mm.
W. Conningham, Lugt 476
Perino no doubt made this drawing during his first Roman period, most probably between
1522 and 1525. It would seem to prepare an altarpiece. The angular figures who fill the lower part of
the visual field and block any recession, are treated as though they are in high relief, with a
succession of strong vertical emphases. So severe a conception suggests a significant project.
Perino is not known to have painted a Calvary at this time, but in 1525 he signed a contract
for the decoration of the vault and also the walls of the Capella del Crocefisso in the church of San
Marcello al Corso. Perino began painting the vault shortly thereafter but work was soon broken off.
It was only c.1540 that the vault was completed by Daniele da Volterra to a revised design by
Perino. The walls were not begun. The chapel's altarpiece would presumably have been a Calvary or a
Crucified Christ, and the present drawing may have been a project for it.
Another possibility is that it is an alternative idea for a slightly earlier Roman project, the
chapel, probably commissioned by Melchiore Baldassini, whose palace Perino had decorated, in
Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The now fragmentary picture that Perino executed was a Deposition, but
a Calvary might well have been contemplated initially. There is, in fact, a notable similarity between
the Good Thief upper left in the present drawing and that in the corresponding fragment of the
Deposition now in the Royal Collection. The employment of fluttering drapery is also similar.
The fine if severe pen line is characteristic of early work by Perino and the parallel vertical
lines that model the drapery of the standing woman in the second row, immediately to the spectator's
left of the cross, can be compared, for example, with those of the curtain in the Venus and Cupid
(Florence, Uffizi, inv.13552F) of 1527. The continuous, thin yet elastic line, sharp in places but with
lyrical runs and curves are also characteristic of Perino and the simplified geometrical construction of
the two thieves is found in several drawings by him of this period. Perino seems to have made more
use of tracing than his immediate contemporaries, and his pen drawings often display a tendency
towards linear simplification.
Perino's Calvary is not specifically based on that in Dürer's Small Passion, but Dürer's
influence is clear in the costumes, the solidly filled surface and the gestures. The body of Christ also
has echoes of certain of Schongauer’s treatments of Christ on the Cross, but no direct dependence can
be established. Perino would have been alerted to Dürer's narrative inventiveness while in Raphael's
orbit, if not earlier, and he would have become aware of Pontormo's interest in the German artist
when he returned in Florence in 1523. Dürer remained a referent for Perino even in later years and
the fusion here of sculpturesque relief with expressively angular forms is very effective.
From a photograph Professoressa Elena Parma considers the present drawing to be a copy
after Perino; the compiler, on the other hand, thinks that it is autograph, as the variants between the
black chalk underdrawing and the pen lines would tend to suggest.
Paul Joannides
Perino del Vaga.
37
PROVENANCE:
Recto: An Allegory of Fortitude?
Verso: The Facade of a Palace and figure sketches
Hans M. Callmann, NY
The sheet, drawn on recto and verso, seems to have been taken from a sketch-book. But the
truncation of the ink lines on the left side of the verso indicates that the sheet was once wider.
The recto drawing shows what may be an allegory of Fortitude. The linear but lively pen
style is clearly very close to that of Perino del Vaga. Comparison can be made with several drawings
generally agreed to date from the end of Perino's career. One might cite those studies reproduced and
discussed by Elena Parma in her fundamental exhibition catalogue of 1999: those in the Fitzwillam
Museum (Parma, 167 verso) and the Ashmolean Museum (Ibid. no.168 verso). For the woman seen
from the rear comparison may be made with the drawing in the Martin von Wagner Museum in
Wurzburg (Ibid. no.169) where both the head type and the undulating form are very similar.
The verso is more problematic. The structure of the putto seems a little awkward for Perino,
whose infants are generally more rhythmical, but close observation of the structures of the left
forearm and hand and of the left leg does reveal a formulation in a series of ovals very much in
Perino's manner.
The sketch of the facade of a grand four-storey palace is surprising. It does not appear to be a
preparatory sketch, since the details seem to be fully worked-out, and it is more likely, despite its free
handling, that it is a ricordo of a design already completed. Although Perino is not known to have
practiced as an architect, he was certainly well-informed about architectural elements. He was active
as a decorator of facades, an activity which could – as in the façade of the Palazzo Doria in Genoa –
entail the pictorial regularization of distinctly irregular pre-existing structures, a task requiring
considerable architectural sophistication. This facade has little space for frescoes and it must be seen
as a pure architectural design. It might, in principle, have been for a building to be represented in the
background of a fresco, but it seems in the present case that, late in his career, Perino, following his
master Raphael and his one-time colleague, Giulio Romano, developed ambitions as an architect.
recto
The architectural forms represented here are very advanced and they clearly have a close
relation (as Professor Deborah Howard has kindly confirmed, noting similarities to the Palazzo
Marino and the Palazzo dei Giureconsulti in Milan) to the work of the Genoese architect Galeazzo
Alessi. Whether Alessi came into personal contact with Perino is unknown, although he certainly
knew well Perino’s work in Genoa, but it is clear, as Professor Howard Burns remarked in 1975, that
many of Alessi’s architectural ideas depended directly from Perino. Indeed, Professor Burns
speculated that Alessi might have encountered Perino in Rome shortly before the latter’s death; it is
not impossible that Alessi might have acquired some drawings by Perino. In any case, the present
drawing must date from the very end of Perino's life.
Paul Joannides
verso
Perino del Vaga (after)
38
PROVENaNCE:
Moses and the Burning Bush
Pen and ink with white body-colour; 170 x 282 mm.
Col. Marquise PH d Chennevieres, Lugt 2072
Przbam-Gladona, Zürich
The present drawing appears to be a copy, or perhaps a tracing, of a lost drawing by Perino.
The composition is obviously a streamlined version of the famous representation of the same subject
in the vault of bay IX of Raphael’s loggia. There may also be some influence from the second
treatment of the subject in fictive relief in the dado of the loggia, on which Perino probably worked.
The simplifications imposed here are characteristic of Perino and suggest that the original of
this design was probably made in the mid- 1530s, but no project which might have contained this
scene is known, nor can any other drawings by or after Perino be attached to a Moses or an Old
Testament cycle.
Paul Joannides
POLIDORO DA CARAVAGGIO
Polidoro da Caravaggio (after)
ca. 1500 - Messina - ca. 1543
39
LITERATURE:
EXHIBITION:
The Triumph of Aemilius Paulus over Barbarian Tribes.
This drawing is an early copy after the frieze decoration by Polidoro da Caravaggio from an
unidentified Palace on the Piazza Madama (See Marabottini, pl.cxxxii/2, Ravelli, pp.303-5 and
Leone di Castris, pp. 133-6 and p. 502 for the fullest listing of drawn copies). The frieze, which in part
survives in the deposits of Palazzo Barberini, represents the Triumph of Aemilius Paulus over
Barbarian Tribes.
Polidoro's facade decorations, generally in grisaille, many of which depicted themes from
Classical antiquity, were profoundly inspired by Roman relief sculpture, in their compositional
principles as well as in their details. But unlike most earlier pictorial imitations of Roman reliefs,
they were enriched by Polidoro's familiarity with Raphael's inspirationally free employment of
classical sources and invigorated by a uniquely powerful figure construction, seen so emphatically in
his drawings. Polidoro's facade decorations provided an open-air school of classicising painting on a
large scale, and because they were universally accessible, unlike Raphael's work in the Vatican, they
provided inspiration for minor and indigent artists, as well as for major figures like Taddeo Zuccaro
and Rubens. They are probably the most copied works of their period.
The present drawing has been attributed to Perino del Vaga. Perino was certainly interested
in the work of his contemporary in Raphael's shop, and by him survives a copy after one of
Polidoro's frescos on the Casino del Bufalo (Madrid, Prado). But the pen work here lacks the
decorative fluency of Perino's handling, and although certain flourishes come quite close to features
found in his earliest work, the finicky hatching in the shadows is more reminiscent of the pen style of
Perino's brother-in-law, Raphael's pupil Gian Francesco Penni. Penni might well have copied some
examples of Polidoro's work - Giulio Romano certainly copied a figure from the Palazzo Gaddi
(Formerly Ellesmere Collection) - but he cannot be proved to have done so. It seems more likely that
the present drawing was made by an as yet unidentified young artist working in the Penni-Perino
circle.
Paul Joannides
Attributed to Pellegrino Tibaldi after Polidoro da Caravaggio
Vasolda 1527 - 1596 Milan
40
Unidentified Roman Subject
For the very widespread copying of Polidoro's facade decorations see the previous entry.
The present drawing was made after one of the scenes, whose subject is still unidentified,
painted between the windows of the second floor of the Palazzo Milesi (See Marabottini, no.cxlvii;
Ravelli, pp.426-8 and Leone di Castris, pp.497-8). The Palazzo Milesi was probably the most admired
of all Polidoro's facade decoration and copies after it are very numerous. The present drawing is of
high quality and by a draughtsman of real accomplishment. Although it has an old attribution to
Perino del Vaga it is certainly not by him. But the approach is indebted to Perino's late style and it is
no doubt by an artist active in his circle in Rome in the 1540s. The watermark, a shield containing a
star in a circle seems to be early. The verso is blackened for transfer to another surface, and the
drawing may have been the source of other copies; in principle it might have been made in
preparation for a engraving, or employed for that purpose by an engraver, but no early print is
known after this scene.
The fluid, fluent and elegant handling of wash establishes a real sense of bulk in the figures
and provides a detailed account of their surface relief - an effect that copyists of Polidoro did not
always convey - are reminiscent of the Bolognese painter Pellegrino Tibaldi, one of the most
individual and powerful artists working in the circle of Perino del Vaga in the 1540s. The type of the
child is also like Tibaldi’s. Obviously, any such suggestion should be treated with caution, but it is
interesting that another copy of the same scene, in the Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
at Windsor Castle, was attributed to Pellegrino by both Marabottini (cl.3) and Ravelli (p.426,
no.839).
Paul Joannides
Attributed to Pellegrino Tibaldi after Polidoro da Caravaggio
Vasolda 1527 - 1596 Milan
41
3a: A section of the Niobe Frieze from Palazzo Milesi
3b: Cyrus Defeating the army of Spargabis, from Palazzo Milesi
a. Pen and ink with brush and brown wash,; 217 x 573 mm.
b: Pen and ink with brush and brown wash,; 219 x 540 mm.
These two drawings are obviously by the same hand and were drawn at the same moment.
Both are copies after sections of the façade of the Palazzo Milesi. The first copies the left-hand section
of the Niobe frieze immediately above the ground floor; it treats about a fifth of the complete frieze.
The second is after fourth scene from the right above the windows of the piano nobile, together with
part of the framing element on the right, although, inexplicably, the positions of the trophy and the
vase are reversed with respect to the painted scheme, as we know it from other copies. It seems likely,
although one cannot be certain, that the draughtsman copied the entire facade
As the immediately preceding and succeeding drawings demonstrate, the façade of Palazzo
Milesi was one of the most admired of all Polidoro’s decorative schemes. The present copies are of
high quality, and are very richly executed, in a manner that evokes the fictive relief of the frescoes
with verve and fluency: this suggests that they are by a major artist.
These two copies were given by the late Professor Konrad Oberhuber to Pellegrino Tibaldi
and this attribution seems very plausible to the compiler. If Oberhuber was correct, then the slight
differences in style between this pair of drawings and the preceding one, may - if the compiler’s
tentative attribution of that too to Pellegrino is accepted – perhaps be explained by a short time lag
between them.
Paul Joannides
Attributed to G.F. Bezzi, called Il Nosadella after Polidoro da Caravaggio
ca. 1549 - 1571 Bologna
42
Recto: A Trophy from Palazzo Milesi
Verso: Jael and Sisera?
Recto: Brush and brown wash over black chalk with white body colour; Verso, brush
and brown wash over black chalkon blue paper with a fragmentary watermark of
crossed arrows; 195 x 276mm.
The recto drawing on this sheet is a copy after the trophy by Polidoro above the central
window of the second floor of the Palazzo Milesi. The five trophies on the second level, like the vases
on the piano nobile, were magnificent inventions and had a pervasive influence upon later metalwork.
They were copied in large numbers of drawings of varying levels of quality. But in comparison with
those reproduced by Marabottini, cxlvi, Ravelli, pp.446-9 (see also Leone di Castris, p.498) it can
safely be said that the present example is the finest. In its richness of surface effect, its freedom of pen
line and its intensely pictorial handling of wash, it is clearly the work of a major draughtsman.
A clue to his identity is provided by the chalk sketch on the verso which shows a figure who
seems to be female, striking downwards at another strongly foreshortened recumbent figure who is no
doubt male. The influence of the figures at the right hand middle section of Michelangelo's Last
Judgement is obvious, and implies a terminus post quem of 1541. The pictorial richness of the recto and
the vigour of the foreshortened figure are reminiscent of the drawings of G.F Bezzi, called Il
Nosadella, whose paintings and drawings have in the past often been confused with those of his
contemporary and Bolognese compatriot, Pellegrino Tibaldi. The verso probably represents Jael and
Sisera, although, since no weapon is clearly indicated, Judith and Holfernes would also be a
possibility. Relatively few of Nosadella’s drawings have so far been identified but it is clear from
those that he was a draughtsman of great power and energy and one who thought in substantial
masses. His capacity for deploying large figures in energetic poses is clear even in his Virgin and Child
groups, and is particularly evident in his magniloquent rendering of Thyestes and Aerope, recently on
the art market (See Matthiessen, 2001, no.9). Here, he seems to be working his way towards an action
scene of unusually powerful impact.
Paul Joannides
Polidoro da Caravaggio (after)
ca. 1500 - Messina - ca. 1543
43
Recto: A Satyr with a Bull and Heifers
Verso: A Seated Prophet
Recto: Pen and ink with brown wash on blue paper; 220 x 315 mm.
Verso: Pen and ink over traces of black and red chalk
Although lively and attractive in the handling of its washes, this drawing is a copy after a lost
painting, presumably a fresco, and not a study for one. The chalk sketch of foliage at the upper right
shows either that the copy is partially finished or that the copyist considered extending the scene.
It is likely that the Satyr was copied from a different source from the animals, perhaps a
fresco in the same room or on the same facade, rather than that he is part of the action. He may have
been a dividing element between frescoes, perhaps in simulated stucco. A drawing in Dijon, published
by Ravelli, no 376 (See also Guillaume, no.680), shows the same arrangement of animals, but a man
and a woman are placed at the left of the scene, with the woman pointing inwards. The Dijon
drawing is annotated with Polidoro’s name.
The subject represented is not clear to the compiler. The two most prominent animals look
into one another's eyes with what seems to be affection, and that the theme might be amorous would
be supported by the winged putto, could he firmly be identified as Cupid; but he cannot, and Ravelli
interprets him as a genius. It is natural to think of the subject as some scene of metamorphosis.
Jupiter's beautiful mistress, Io, was transformed into a cow by the jealous Juno and it would be
heartening to think that Jupiter continued to pay conjugal visits to her in her new state; however
nothing in Ovid supports such a reading and the compiler is aware of no other source that might
justify it. More prosaically the composition might illustrate some Roman narrative of successful
animal husbandry.
The present sheet supports the attribution of the original composition to Polidoro since it
bears on the verso a copy, perhaps by a different hand from the recto, of an unidentified Prophet, one
of several recorded as frescoed by Polidoro on the façade of the church of San Pietro in Vincoli (For
another linear copy after this figure see Marabottini, fig. cxxvi.1). The rich use of wash in the recto
drawing and the solidity of the rendering once again suggest an artist like Pellegrino Tibaldi, to
whom it was attributed by Konrad Oberhuber; however, to the compiler it seems of slightly lesser
quality than the other copies here tentatively attributed to Pellegrino, and it may be by one of his
associates.
Paul Joannides
Attributed to Raffaellino da Reggio after Polidoro da Caravaggio.
Codemondo ca. 1550 - 578 Rom
44
PROVENANCE:
An Unidentified Roman Scene
F. Abbott, Lugt 970
This solid and efficient copy by a very competent mid-to late 16th century artist active in
Rome, is after an unidentified scene in simulated relief from an unidentified but famous facade,
known in at least one other copy: see Ravelli, no.374. The contours have been indented for transfer
and the drawing may have been used for a reproductive print.
With all due caution, given that this drawing is a somewhat worn copy, the compiler would
propose a tentative attribution to the talented but short lived Raffaellino da Reggio (1550-1578),
who was himself active as a painter of facades and was certainly interested in the work of his great
predecessor. This is based on a similarity of technique - wash over regular hatching - with his
drawing of a figure in profile in the British Museum (Gere and Pouncey no. 240) and on the
morphological likeness to another drawing perhaps representing Diana, also in the British Museum
(Gere and Pouncey no. 239).
Paul Joannides
Circle of Polidoro da Caravaggio
ca. 1500 - Messina - ca. 1543
45
The Feast in the House of Simon
Brush and brown wash over black chalk; 239 x 146 mm.
Within an arched field we see the episode of the Magdalen drying the Saviour's feet with her
hair. The drawing has the appearance of a modello, and the technique is reminiscent of those by Gian
Francesco Penni. It might have been made for a fresco to be executed on the wall of a refectory or,
perhaps, a cloister. It is unclear whether the Tuscan pillars that frame the scene on either side are
representations of a real architectural setting, or whether they were simply planned to simulate one.
At any rate, the vanishing point as defined by the coffering of the ceiling is at the right edge of the
pictorial field and this, and the form of Christ's gesture, suggest that the scene was continued in
another arched field immediately to the right, into which, presumably, the table extended. It may be
that Simon occupied the other end of the table. If so, the overall composition would have reflected
the famous design by Giulio for the fresco of the same subject in the chapel of the Magdalen in Ss
Trinità dei Monte, now lost but familiar from Marcantonio's engraved copy and a drawing after this
by Parmigianino. However, it is also worth noting that the predella panel of the same subject by the
quattrocento Sienese painter Matteo di Giovanni in the Kunsthaus, Zurich, also shows the scene
taking place behind an arcade of two arches whose supporting column divides the scene into two
halves. On the left, as here, the Magdalen dries Christ's feet; on the right Simon, at the opposite end
of the table, faces the Saviour. There is probably no direct connection between the two
representations, but the surface division of Matteo's predella does suggest that some artists felt it
psychologically appropriate to separate the group of Christ and the Magdalen from the other main
participant at the feast.
If the present drawing was intended for a compartment in a cloister, it may be presumed that
further episodes from the life of Christ or the Virgin were to be included. However, the only drawing
by Polidoro of a similar format, that for the Annunciation in the Louvre (Inv.6799; Leone de Castris
fig.528) is generally placed to Polidoro's Messinese period and thought to be a modello for a lost
altarpiece. In the absence of positive evidence it seems safer to assume that it was intended as a single
scene on the wall of a refectory, perhaps in a nunnery rather than a monastery, given the prominence
of the Magdalen.
The drawing is traditionally ascribed to Polidoro da Caravaggio, whose figure style is recalled
by the bulky forms and whose sense of compositional grandeur by the clear and solid arrangement.
However, it must remain at present a borderline attribution. While the physical types and the
handling come close to a drawing such as the Adoration of the Shepherds in Christ Church, Oxford,
this drawing lacks the force of modelling and plastic variety found in that and it could as well be by a
close follower as Polidoro himself. It should also be noted that no other drawing by Polidoro can be
connected with this composition or with this subject; nor is any treatment by him of the Feast in the
House of Simon known from contemporary documentation or Vasari.
Paul Joannides
RAPHAEL’S RIVAL: SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO
Sebastiano del Piombo (after)
Venedig 1485 – 1547 Rom
46
PROVENANCE:
LITERATURE:
EXHIBITION:
The Flagellation of Christ
Pen and ink with brown wash over black chalk; 420m x 327 mm.
J. B. Skippe, Lugt Suppl. 1529a-b
R. Wood
E. Holland-Martin
A. Castelli
E. und M. Bick
F.W. Robinson, J. T. Palletti. Italien Drawings from the Bick Collection,
Hanover, New Hampshire, 1971, (Kat.Nr 5 )
cp. Soth. Old Master Drawings 5.12.77, No. 47
Italien Drawings from the Bick Collection, Hannover - New Hamphire, 2.4 - 25.4. 1971
This copy shows Christ and the flagellator immediately to the viewer’s right of Christ in
Sebastiano’s famous and much-copied mural in the chapel of Pier Francesco Borgherini in San Pietro
in Montorio. As noted by Bradford Watters, to whose catalogue entry on this drawing the compiler is
indebted, it was certainly made after the painting and not Sebastiano’s lost cartoon. It may
originally have been complete but, as Watters pointed out, the second flagellator on this side of the
painting is no more than outlined, and the copyist clearly intended to emphasise the surface relief of
the foreground figures.
The Flagellation was designed for Sebastiano, at that time in the full throws of his
competition with Raphael, by his friend Michelangelo. Two autograph sketches by him survive for
the mural, a compositional sketch in sanguine and a black chalk study of the figure of Christ,
concentrating on his torso, both in the British Museum. Michelangelo prepared a nude modello for the
final design, which Sebastiano followed very closely, only adding draperies; this does not survive but
an apparently exact copy of it, probably to scale, by Giulio Clovio is in the Royal Collection at
Windsor Castle. Michelangelo’s drawings were probably made in the summer of 1516, but the section
of the mural scheme containing the Flagellation seems to have been completed by Sebastiano only in
1523-4.
The present copy is certainly early, as the prominent watermark indicates. It was probably
made in the 1520s or 1530s, soon after the mural’s completion. The identity of the copyist is
unknown, but the severity of approach suggests an artist in sympathy with Sebastiano’s (and
Michelangelo’s) ideals
Paul Joannides
Sebastiano Luciani, called del Piombo, and workshop
Venedig 1485 – 1547 Rom
47
The Assumption of the Virgin (The Immaculate Conception)
Brown and grey wash over traces of black chalk on bluish-grey paper (two pieces joined
centrally in a horizontal line), with white body colour, retouched with black chalk and white
body colour, some contours reinforced in pen and brown ink, a heavy brown ink line along the
margins.
Two parallel signs of damaging on the lower right.
Inscription carried by the two angels: ASSUMPTIO DEI/ PARAE IN COELUM
This recently discovered drawing—previously unknown to Sebastiano scholarship—is a
version, with several differences, of the Assumption of the Virgin in Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum,
executed by the Venetian artist as a first project for the altarpiece for the funerary chapel of
Agostino Chigi in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome (Van Regteren Altena, Bullettin van her
Rijksmuseum, 1955; Shearman, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1961). Sebastiano
must have provided his patron—initially Agostino Chigi and then, after his death, Filippo Sergardi,
apostolic protonotary and executor of Chigi’s last will—with several modelli until the final version
was chosen. The Amsterdam Assumption of the Virgin was followed by two later drawings of the Birth
of the Virgin, a complex compositional study in Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett, and
the final modello in Paris, Louvre, which is very close to the altarpiece in the Chigi chapel as
executed.
Thanks to this new drawing, it is possible to reconstruct more clearly the sequence of the four
drawings. The present drawing, together with the Amsterdam modello, is concerned with the initial
idea, which is based on the iconography of the Assumption, whereas the second group, in Berlin and
Paris, develops the subject of the Nativity of the Virgin. The final altarpiece in Chigi’s chapel is closer
to the drawing modello in Paris.
The reason why the Assumption with the crescent moon, a symbol of the Immaculate Conception,
was eventually discarded, may be found in the still uncertain iconography of the Immaculate
Conception in this period. In fact, even though the pope Sixtus IV had established a liturgical
equivalence between the Nativity of the Virgin and her Immaculate Conception, a conventional
iconography had not yet been defined. For this reason, it is probable that Sergardi eventually chose
the Nativity as a more adequate subject, since it celebrates both the Conception and the Nativity of
Mary exempted from Original sin, as argued by both the Franciscans and the Augustinians (Barbieri,
in Sebastiano del Piombo, exh. cat., 2008). Santa Maria del Popolo was one of the most famous
Augustinian churches of Rome, known for the special devotion to the Mother of Christ.
As Paul Joannides has noted (in Sebastiano del Piombo, exh. cat. 2008) the Amsterdam
drawing is characterized by a formal retrospection, and indeed Shearman (1961) had already pointed
to Mantegna as a model for the figure of the Virgin and her neo-Byzantine drapery. We may add that this
retrospection has a devotional and iconographic source: the altarpiece of the Assumption of Mary, Queen of
the Angels, in the Sistine Chapel, with Pope Sixtus kneeling in the foreground, an emblem of the pope’s
devotion to the Immaculate Conception.
Comparison between the Amsterdam drawing and the present one is particularly instructive
in this context. First, the point of view in the Amsterdam drawing is lower and closer, with resulting
effects of monumentality, whereas the Hamburg drawing is not as successful; secondly, the groups of
the apostles in the Amsterdam drawing are more effectively separated and the composition is more
spacious. The head of Saint Peter is more foreshortened in the Amsterdam drawing, compared to the
Hamburg companion, yet loosing in exactness. Furthermore, the visage of Mary in Amsterdam is
inclined and her expression gentle, while the Hamburg Virgin is more rigid, closer to an iconic and
static model (as Mantegna’s and Perugino’s). On the other hand, the landscape is well preserved in
the Hamburg drawing, whereas in the Amsterdam one it is almost completely vanshed. However, the
most important difference is represented by the two angels symmetrically flanking the Virgin: in the
Hamburg drawing, dancing on the clouds, they proffer the symbolic palm and the lily, while in the
Amsterdam drawing these details have been erased and modified, to obtain a different, more elegant
solution, with gestures of prayer and more ethereal lower bodies. At an attentive scrutiny, as remarked by
Joannides (Sebastiano del Piombo, ex. cat., 2008), it is still possible to find traces of the earlier version—closer
to the Hamburg drawing—in the Amsterdam one; thus the erased legs of the angels are still clearly visible.
In short, we may assume that the Hamburg drawing was realized together with the Amsterdam one.
The latter is more refined and of a higher quality, and was probably presented to the patron, the former was a
workshop tool, a record for the artist. The alterations on the Amsterdam drawing, therefore, were no doubt
made by Sebastiano himself, presumably in order to satisfy the patron’s wishes.
The inscription (ASSUMPTIO DEI/ PARAE..) in the Hamburg drawing is slightly different
from the one in the Amsterdam drawing (ASSUMPTIO DEIPA/ RAE..), and this difference
reinforces the view that the two drawings were executed in parallel in Sebastiano’s workshop (which
explains some weaknesses of the Hamburg drawing), instead of one being a copy of the other. Thus,
the Hamburg drawing documents an early version of the project, which has been reworked and
developed in the Amsterdam modello. Finally, the trumpet-blowing angels were not added to the
Amsterdam drawing by another hand, as has been suggested in the past, but were originally conceived by
Sebastiano and are documented in the Hamburg version.
Costanza Barbieri
THE CIRCLE OF MICHELANGELO
Circle of Baccio Bandinelli
Gaiole in Chianti 1488 - 1560 Florenz
48
PROVENANCE:
A Seated Ignudo
Col. Reitlinger
This exceptionally interesting drawing is a free variant of two of Michelangelo's ignudi in the
sixth bay of the Sistine Ceiling, those to the left and right above Ezechial. It was probably drawn in
preparation for a figure with a function similar to that of the ignudi, who ostensibly perform the
humble task of supporting garlands of oak leaves, but whose roles are expanded by Michelangelo to
embody diverse states of the human spirit. This drawing is far from attaining Michelangelo's spiritual
intensity but it nevertheless possesses a lively presence. The strap that passes through both the
figure's left and his right hands notionally suspends two spheres. Although the significance of these is
entirely conjectural, they may have some heraldic function, possibly, but by no means securely,
Medicean. The figure might well have been intended for some temporary decoration - such as a
triumphal arch - rather than for a permanent setting.
It was suggested by the late Marianne Joannides that the drawing is by Baccio Bandinelli,
and the stumping of the chalk on the torso, face and calves, the wave-like treatment of the hair, the
broad parallel chalk strokes that serve to establish both the front plane of the block on which the
youth sits and the background, all support that attribution. But even discounting the repair to the
upper torso, which has diminished the unity of the upper part of the drawing, the articulation of the
limbs is less secure than one would expect to find in Bandinelli, and the figure's internal proportions
more wayward. It may register the young Baccio’s first experience of Rome, when he moved in the
circle of Raphael, but the possibility that it might be a very early work by Francesco Salviati should
also be considered.
Paul Joannides
Attributed to Giovanni Battista di Jacopo di Guaspare, called Il Rosso
Florenz 1494 - 1540 Paris
49
LITERATURE:
Allegory of the Immaculate Conception
Pen and ink with wash and white body colour; 347 x 212 mm.
David Franklin. Rosso in Italy, London 1994, Abb. S. 244 Mr. 194, S. 293 Nr. 77
This elaborate allegorical representation of the Immaculate Conception, a complex theological
doctrine for which artists in the first half of the cinquecento strove to find a visual formulation, was
produced by Rosso towards the end of his Italian period. It is, as David Franklin pointed out in 1994
“a more readily identifiable treatment of the subject” than the designs that Rosso made in 1528 for
the cycle of frescos planned for the atrium of Santissima Annunciata in Arezzo but never executed. It
was presumably a design for an altarpiece, and it was clearly quite well-known: Franklin (1994,
p.293) notes several echoes of it, and it seems to have been in Vasari’s mind when he painted his
famous version of the subject some years later. But the planned location of Rosso’s proposed
painting and its patron are alike unknown.
As Franklin clarified, Rosso made two varying designs for this project. The complement of
figures and their identities remains the same, but their poses and arrangement differ. What is no
doubt the first is known from a drawing in the Hermitage which seems to be a copy of a lost modello
(325x 205 mm., Carroll 1968/1976, D.40) The second redaction of the design is known from the
present drawing and two other similar-size versions, one in Stockholm (Bjurström, 1976, no. 81, 351
x 206 mm.), the other in Christ Church (Byam Shaw, 1976, no. 126, 364 x 216mm.). The Hermitage
drawing is round topped, whereas the others are rectangular, but it is debatable whether this
difference is significant: to the compiler’s eye the rounding of the Hermitage drawing seems not to be
original but the result of later trimming to eliminate an area of damage. However, although it is hard
to believe that the present drawing was ever round-topped, the upper edge has certainly been
trimmed, where the internal frame is missing.
The present drawing, which was first published by Franklin, 1994, pp.245 and 293, plate 194,
stands on the borderline between original and copy. As he remarked, “The drawing currently on the
art market is unpublished and of the three copies after the second design it would appear to be the
only one with any chance of being autograph.” Some of Rosso’s highly finished designs make use of
a scarcely changing pen line that lends itself readily to imitation. His drawings were, indeed, much
copied in his studio when he went to France and controversy has frequently arisen over the status of
individual drawings. However, even the most finished modelli by Rosso generally show signs of
working, especially underlying construction lines, and these are absent from the present drawing. But
its quality is high and the delicacy of the washes and the contained energy of the figures do suggest
that, if it is not a prime original by Rosso, it may well be an autograph replica contemporary with
the original rather than a later replica by a member of Rosso’s studio. It was customary for artists to
provide two versions of a modello as a contractual control and there is no doubt that this drawing is
of much higher quality than those in Christ Church and Stockholm. The watermark on the sheet is
hard to decipher, and the compiler has not succeeded in identifying it in Briquet, but its irregularity
suggests that the paper is early.
Although Rosso was never a pupil of Michelangelo, he studied the great master’s work closely
and critically. He was particularly attracted to the angular – and at times grotesque – figure types as
seen in the Sistine Ancestors of Christ and in some of Michelangelo’s drawings of the early 1520s. He
was also influenced by Michelangelo’s severely geometrical compositional arrangements. Thus the
present design still shows a clear debt to Michelangelo’s National Gallery Entombment despite its
individual features and all its differences from that model.
Paul Joannides
Michelangelo (after)
Caprese 1475 – 1564 Rom
50
PROVENANCE:
Aurora
Black chalk with white body colour on grey paper; 198 x 332 mm.
Col. Lord J. Somers, Lugt 2981
Comte de C. G, Tessin, Lugt 2985
Graf M. V. Fries, Lugt 2903
Fürst Liechtentein
This copy after Michelangelo's Aurora in the New Sacristy is immediately reminiscent of the
copy made from a similar angle by Francesco Salviati in Edinburgh (RSA 863). Salviati's drawing
has been differently dated, to c.1539 by Raphael Rosenberg and to shortly before the figure was set
in place on the tomb in 1546 by the compiler, but there is agreement that the Edinburgh copy was
made from the statue and not a reduction. Given the angle from which the present drawing is made,
it too could not be later than 1546 if it were copied from Michelangelo's statue. However, a later date
would be permissible if it could be shown that it was copied from a reduction of the statue reductions were in circulation from the mid-1530s - or that it was made from another drawing.
This drawing, understandably, has also been attributed to Francesco Salviati. But although
certain aspects of the handling of chalk, notably the hatching on the left leg, do reflect knowledge of
Francesco's work, overall it is not in his style nor does it have his exactitude of hand and eye - the
modelling and foreshortening of Aurora's left leg, for example, is not wholly successful. The drawing
does evoke something of the re-fleshing of Michelangelo's marble that one finds in the Edinburgh
drawing and it may be that the draughtsman drew alongside Salviati, or was acquainted with his
work. But there is a real difference in quality.
The inscription Michel Ange is found on drawings that passed through the collection of J.D.
Lempereur.
Paul Joannides
Workshop of Giulio Romano after Michelangelo and Giulio Romano.
51
Recto: The Dream of Human Life after Michelangelo
Verso: Copies after lost drawings by Giulio Romano
Pen and brown wash; 366 x 273 mm.
The recto is a same-size copy of Michelangelo's black chalk Presentation Drawing of the socalled Dream of Human Life, now in the Prince's Gate Collection of the Courtauld Institute (Black
chalk; 396 x 280 mm.). Michelangelo's Dream was drawn in the early 1530s as a gift for a friend,
perhaps, but not certainly, Tommaso de' Cavalieri. Michelangelo's presentation drawings were
enormously admired and much reproduced, although there are fewer copies after the Dream of
Human Life than many of the others.
It is documented that several of the Presentation Drawings of religious subjects that
Michelangelo made around 1540 for Vittoria Colonna were copied almost immediately for Cardinal
Ercole Gonzaga of Mantua, and traces of their presence can be found in the city (See Brown 1991).
This copy indicates that Mantuan interest in Michelangelo's Presentation Drawings extended to his
secular ones. It is obviously in the style of Giulio Romano and it provides evidence that the Dream of
Human Life was among the Michelangelo drawings known in the city in which Giulio passed the
second half of his life. There must have been much more commissioning of copy drawings, and much
wider circulation of them, than we now tend to imagine.
The verso drawings confirm the link with Giulio. They are after his work and their technique
indicates that they reproduce drawings by him rather than paintings. Giulio's originals have not
survived - or not been identified - but these copies record his characteristic style so clearly as to leave
no doubt of the authorship of the absent prototypes. The purpose of two of them is clear. The putti
astride dolphins at the base of the page were drawn by Giulio for the compartment at the lower right
of the South lunette of the Camera delle Aquile in Palazzo Te (Belluzzi, II, p.537). The Maiden with a
Unicorn at the upper right is a common symbol of virginity and best known today from Leonardo's
elegant early drawing of the subject in the Ashmolean Museum (Parker, no.15). Leonardo's design
was developed further either by the master himself or by one of his followers, since a painted version
exists in the Castel Sant'Angelo, and an engraving of it was issued by Agostino Veneziano, signed and
dated 1515. Agostino Veneziano was one of Raphael's regular engravers and Giulio was in close
contact with him in the second decade since Agostino engraved at least one of Giulio’s own designs.
He would, therefore, certainly have known of Leonardo’s design.The original of this Maiden with a
Unicorn was made for a stucco relief in the Camera dei Venti in Palazzo Te (Ibid. p.298, fig. 537).
Thus the same sheet contains one drawing after, and one drawing reflecting, the two great rivals:
Michelangelo and Leonardo. The third drawing on the verso, at the upper left, shows a girl raising
her apron before an altar. The purport of her action is not clear but the pose and style are similar to
the standing girl in Giulio's drawing of the Sacrifice of a Goat to Jupiter in the National Gallery of Art,
Washington (B-26.785). The compiler has not found her figure in Palazzo Te, but the drawing may
have been a discarded idea for a second stucco figure in the Camera dei Venti, the Vesta, executed in a
different form (Belluzzi, II, p.295, fig.527).
The quality of the verso drawings is obviously higher than that of the recto but the two sides are not
necessarily by different hands. The Dream of Human Life is a complex design with different levels of
definition and with some extraordinarily rich modeling. The replica available in Mantua was
presumably also in black chalk and to make a copy of that in pen and wash may as well have
unnerved a draughtsman unused to such variety and surface complexity. By contrast, for a pupil of
Giulio to copy drawings by his master in the same medium would have been much easier.
Paul Joannides
Workshop? of Daniele da Volterra after Michelangelo
Volterra ca. 1509 - 1566 Rom
52
Calvary (“The Three Crosses”)
Black chalk; 159 x 200 mm.
Although now slightly trimmed at the sides, this is a same-size copy after the upper part of
Michelangelo's famous red-chalk drawing, the so-called Three Crosses, in the British Museum (Wilde
no. 32; red chalk; 394 x 281 mm.). It was probably originally complete but, for reasons about which
we can only speculate, has been cut down.
Michelangelo's drawing, whose purpose is unknown, was made in the early 1520s and it may
have remained with Michelangelo until his death since it was in the Casa Buonarroti until it was
acquired by Jean-Baptiste Wicar, from whose collection it passed to that of Sir Thomas Lawrence.
The technique of the present copy, with its carefully separated hatchings, is characteristic of
the sketchier drawings of Daniele da Volterra and of his immediate followers. In the later years of
Michelangelo's life Daniele was very much his protege and in several cases Michelangelo made designs
to assist the younger artist. Daniele's close friendship with Michelangelo, which developed in the later
1540s, would have allowed him access to the master's drawings and he was either given, or inherited,
a substantial collection of them. The present drawing is not by Daniele himself but it an open
question whether it reproduces a lost copy made by Daniele himself, or whether the draughtsman
was one of Daniele's students who gained access to Michelangelo's original via his master.
Paul Joannides
Cherubino Alberti after Michelangelo
Borgo 1553 - 1615 Rom
53
PROVENANCE:
Simon of Cyrene from the “Last Judgement”
Fürst Liechtenstein
This copy of Simon of Cyrene from the Last Judgement is by Cherubino Alberti, who also
engraved this famous figure. It well exemplifies the strength and energy of one of the finest pen
draughtsmen active at the end of the sixteenth century in Rome, and himself a great executant of
decorative schemes. It can be compared with other drawings by him such as Hermann Fiore nos. 6
(verso), 11, 107,142.
Paul Joannides
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Internet Katalog 1 Englisch- Version 2

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