Reviews of exhibitions

Renaissance Studies Vol. 17 No. 2

© 2003 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKRESTRenaissance Studies1447-4658© 2003 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Oxford University PressJune 2003172163183Reviews of exhibitions

Reviews of exhibitionsReviews of exhibitions

REVIEWS OF EXHIBITIONS

Il Quattrocento a Camerino. Luce e Prospettiva nel Cuore della Marca (Cam-erino, 19 July–17 November 2002).

Much damaged in the past by earthquakes, Camerino stands on a windy ridgebetween the river valleys of the Chienti and the Potenza in the very centre of Italy,with spectacular views in all directions, particularly southwards towards the MontiSibillini. In spite of its remoteness, the town had some commercial importance in thefourteenth and fifteenth centuries (it was, after all, on a route between Rome andthe Adriatic coast), when it was dominated by the local da Varano family. Papal

condottieri

and princely

signori

, the da Varano never quite achieved the fame of theneighbouring Montefeltro of Urbino, though they were also to suffer at the hands ofCesare Borgia. This recent, well-displayed, and unpretentious exhibition did not domuch to illustrate the Da Varano regime and patronage, though it included thehandsome marble bust (Cat. 90) of Giulio Cesare da Varano (ruled 1444–1502), andseveral essays in the excellent and not over-heavy catalogue (edited by Andrea DeMarchi and Maria Giannatiempo Lopez, published by Federico Motta, Milan, 2002,price

$

35) are about the dynasty and the city, and help to fill the gap. Instead, theexhibition consisted almost entirely of religious works of art, a number of which werecommissioned by the Da Varano. Many items belonged to the permanent collectionsof Camerino’s Pinacoteca and Museum, in whose well-designed premises – the formerchurch and conventual buildings of San Domenico – the exhibition was held; somecame from churches and collections in the region, others were lent by public andprivate collections elsewhere in Italy and abroad.

Camerino was not the birthplace of any big names in Italian Renaissance paint-ing and sculpture; in fact, it is difficult to name some of its native artists. Even theacclaimed local master known as Carlo da Camerino turns out to have had a falseidentity (through the misreading of a signature) and is now known as Olivuccio diCiccarello da Camerino (active at Ancona 1388; d. 1439). A few vivid small paintings ofhis (including loans from Ancona, Paris, and the Vatican) featured in the exhibition(Cat. 4–13), though what may have been his masterpiece, a fresco at Loreto commis-sioned by Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan, no longer exists. The most famousartist of the region during the early fifteenth century was Gentile da Fabriano, andhe is linked with another contemporary from Camerino, Arcangelo di Cola (known1416–29). Angelo is recorded as having worked at Florence and Rome between 1420and 1424; the exhibition borrowed his exquisite small Madonna and Saints fromUrbino (Cat. 14) and the several parts of a predella from Modena (Cat. 15).

The two biggest stars in the ‘Camerte’ firmament (one does not say ‘Camerinese’)were, however, ‘the master of the Annunciation of Spermento’, alias ?Giovanni

Reviews of exhibitions

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Angelo d’Antonio (documented 1444–76), and Giovanmatteo di Piermatteo Boccati(documented 1445–

c

. 1488). Spermento was the name of a convent of ObservantFranciscan nuns at Piancusciano (near Camerino) for whom the master painted hisspectacular Annunciation (Cat. 37; Pinacoteca, Camerino). The use of a single squarepanel, the architectural perspective, and other details reflect the artist’s awareness ofFlorentine innovations, even, it is suggested, of the work of Piero della Francesca, andin the lunette above the altarpiece the head of a swarthy man wearing a black cap(peeping out beside the body of Christ) has been identified as his self-portrait, usedas the exhibition’s icon.

Among other altarpieces and detached fresco paintings of the anonymous masterare his brilliant

Crucifixion with

Saints, including St Sebastian and St Lawrence, bothin dazzling costumes (Cat. 51, Gualdo Tadino). Meanwhile Boccati, who even workedin Padua at the time Donatello and Mantegna were there, was represented by hiselaborate

Madonna del Orchestra

(Cat. 23, Perugia), in which angels and putti play avariety of instruments. His masterpiece, the polyptych at Belforte del Chienti, had toremain

in situ

(not far away), but is tantalizingly illustrated in the catalogue by somedetails in colour. However smaller works of Boccati were brought in from near andfar. They included an

Adoration of the Magi

(Cat. 21, Helsinki) that was recentlyrestored (a long account of this appears in the catalogue), which is rather reminis-cent of Benozzo Gozzoli and even contains a tiny portrait identifiable as Cosimo de’Medici. Three

Crucifixions

by his hand were also lent – from Turin, Esztergom, andUrbino (Cat. 24–26) – paintings characterized by the contortions of the thieves oneither side of Jesus and by richly varied background scenery. Another, from Milan(Cat. 27), isolates the main figures at the foot of the cross, particularly a swooningMadonna.

The climax of the exhibition was the Brera’s loan of Carlo Crivelli’s

Madonna dellaCandeletta

(Cat. 89), the central panel of the dispersed trytych commissioned for thehigh altar of Camerino cathedral. The arrival of Venetian painting in the centralMarche, later to be reinforced by Lotto, was therefore excitingly recorded by thismagnificent painting’s return to Camerino (equivalent to the return to Ascoli of hisNational Gallery

Annunciation

). It is a pity only that the other parts of the work, andthe surviving parts of Crivelli’s other Camerino altarpiece, painted for the church ofSan Domenico, were not available. Meanwhile there was also a Tuscan contribution,though of a slightly later period, Signorelli’s

Annunciation

from a nearby oratory.As well as many beautiful paintings, the exhibition contained some splendid ex-

amples of polychrome wood sculpture – above all the Vizzo

Crucifix

(Cat. 1) and theluminescent

St Lucy

with a dagger through her neck from Varano di Sotto (Cat. 56)– most of them the work of another anonymous artist, ‘the Master of the Madonnadi Macereto’. There were also fine gold and silver crucifixes, and a delicate fifteenth-century drawing (Cat. 55) of San Venanzio, the patron of Camerino, in a VaticanLibrary manuscript (he was also represented, holding the city in the palm of hishand, in several paintings).

Finally, the exhibition provided an opportunity to see the church of the Annunzi-ata, founded in 1494 by Giulio Cesare da Varano, which has just reopened afterrestoration, and also the recently uncovered and restored (but somewhat indistinct)frieze of illustrious men and Camerino courtiers, painted possibly by the Master of the

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Annunciation of Spermento, in the former Da Varano Palace (now part of the Uni-versity). For the whole experience it was well worth facing the difficulties of gettingto Camerino (nearest station, on a branch line, ten kilometres away), and of findingsomewhere to eat or to stay overnight in a place pleasantly uncorrupted by tourism.

The Warburg Institute, University of London

D. S.

Chambers

Early Netherlandish Drawings from Jan van Eyck to Hieronymous Bosch(Rubenshuis, Antwerp, 14 June–18 August 2002). Fritz Koreny

et al.,

EarlyNetherlandish Drawings from Jan van Eyck to Hieronymous Bosch

. Antwerp: Rubens

-

huis, 2002. 208 pp., colour and b & w illus. ISBN 90-76704-16-3 (hb); 90-76704-12-0 (pb). Also published in Dutch, French, and German.

The year 2002 was something of a golden one for devotees of early Netherlandish art.Belgium’s year-long celebration of its late-medieval heritage was marked by an ambi-tious exhibition programme, which began with the extraordinary ‘Jan van Eyck, EarlyNetherlandish Painting and Southern Europe’ seen in Bruges, followed by ‘Marvelsof Delight’ in Antwerp during the summer months, and concluding in the autumnwith Leuven’s ‘Medieval Mastery’, devoted to illuminated manuscripts.

Antwerp’s ‘Marvels of Delight’ consisted of three displays of early Netherlandish artacross the city. At the Museum Mayer van den Bergh a series of information boardshighlighted new research on twenty-one of the museum’s fourteenth- and fifteenth-century paintings, to be published in the forthcoming volume of the

Corpus des Prim-itifs Flamands

devoted to its holdings. The Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunstenpresented its notable collection of early Netherlandish pictures in a new arrange-ment, with Flemish works set against European contemporaries such as Jean Fouquetand Simone Martini. The display was supplemented by significant loans, includingeight surviving panels from Goswijn van der Weyden’s

St Dymphna

altarpiece for theabbey at Tongerlo, now in a private collection, and the exact workshop copy of themuseum’s recently cleaned

Virgin and Child by a Fountain

by Jan van Eyck, also froma private collection. Furthermore, visitors had the opportunity to view the ongoingrestoration of Hans Memling’s three huge panels of

Christ with Singing and Music-making Angels

from the Nájera altarpiece in a specially built studio within the galleries.However, the undoubted highlight of Antwerp’s ‘Marvels of Delight’ was the splendid

exhibition of fifty-five fifteenth-century drawings on fifty-one sheets assembled inthree rooms of the upper floor of the Rubenshuis. Curated by Fritz Koreny, assisted byGeorg Zeman and Erwin Pokorny, the exhibition was a product of the Vienna-basedCorpus der deutschen und niederländischen Zeichnungen 1350–1500 researchproject, and brought together loans from twenty-two institutions across Europe andNorth America. Surprisingly, given the expansion of scholarly interest in early Neth-erlandish painting over the past two decades, this was the first ever loan exhibitiondevoted solely to drawings of this period. Drawings undoubtedly were used in vastnumbers in the early Netherlandish painter’s workshop, but only a tiny fractionremain today. It is unclear why this is so, but many drawings must simply have worn


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out through repeated use or were discarded when they were no longer fashionable.To gather together so many extant drawings was an impressive achievement for theRubenshuis, and an event of considerable excitement for art historians and thepublic alike.

The exhibition was fittingly prefaced by two fifteenth-century Netherlandish draw-ings which were owned by Rubens, and had been retouched by him (ex-catalogue:an anonymous study of a

Woman with a Headdress

,

c.

1500, Cleveland Museum of Art;and

The

Crucifixion of St Andrew

by a follower of Hugo van der Goes, Gabinetto Designie Stampe degli Uffizi). The main body of the exhibition was divided into four sec-tions, concentrating on Van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Van der Goes, and Hier-onymous Bosch, together with drawings by their workshop assistants, contemporaries,later followers, and copyists. The list of exhibits was formidable: not only had theorganizers secured one or two key works by each master to headline each section, butthey supplemented them with loans of exceptional interest and beauty. Thus, VanEyck’s unique

St Barbara

panel (cat. 5) was joined by

St James the Lesser

and

St Philip

from Vienna (cats 3 and 4), and Petrus Christus’s

Man with a Falcon

(cat. 12). Rogier’sravishing

Young Woman

from the British Museum (cat. 15) – undoubtedly the star ofthe show, gracing the cover of the catalogue and occupying a central position in theexhibition hang – was accompanied by the Rotterdam

Virgin and Child

(cat. 16) andthe design, punningly known as the

Scupstoel

, for one of the capitals on Brussels TownHall (cat. 23). Hugo van der Goes’s

Jacob and Rachel

(cat. 30), from Christ Church,Oxford, was displayed with the Windsor

Christ on the Cross

(cat. 31) and a

Virgin andChild

associated with the Bouts workshop (cat. 29). Several drawings by and associatedwith Bosch concluded the exhibition, including the

Tree-man

and the charming

Owl’sNest

(cats 40 and 45).Inevitably, given the project from which it arose, the exhibition’s main focus was

on issues of attribution. The connoisseurship of early Netherlandish paintings is anotoriously fraught business as so few works survive and those which do are rarelysigned or documented. This is doubly true of Netherlandish drawings of this period.With the exception of Van Eyck’s

St Barbara

(which in any case occupies ambiguousground between a drawing and a panel painting), none of the works exhibited bearsan autograph signature. The problems entailed in attributing and dating such works,produced in a climate of collaboration, repetition, and imitation, are obvious. Artistictraining was fundamentally based on copying and close assimilation of the master’sstyle, as Van Eyck’s two replica

Virgin and Child by a Fountain

panels displayed at theAntwerp museum vividly demonstrated. On the whole, the exhibition curators wiselytended to err on the side of caution when negotiating these tricky issues. Thus, thesilverpoint drawing of Van Eyck’s lost Maelbeke

Virgin

(cat. 11) is simply described as‘workshop of Van Eyck’, although it is often ascribed to Petrus Christus on accountof the close similarity of the Virgin’s face to Petrus’s painted Virgins. Amongst thetwenty drawings in the section devoted to Rogier van der Weyden, only one, theLondon

Young Woman

, is given unhesitatingly to Rogier himself.Given this caution exercised in attributions, it seems curious to find that no less

than six drawings (cats 23–8) from the Rogier section are unequivocally attributedto Vrancke van der Stockt, in spite of the fact that Vrancke’s oeuvre is essentially anart-historical creation and remains putative. Various facts about Vrancke are available

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from documentary sources: we know, for example, that he witnessed a deed in Rogiervan der Weyden’s house in 1453, and that he succeeded Rogier as town painter ofBrussels in 1464. However, no documented works by Vrancke survive. Hulin de Looassumed that he had been one of Rogier’s

compagnons

( journeymen) and then iden-tified Vrancke as the painter of the

Redemption

altarpiece in the Prado on the groundsof its Rogierian style. There is no direct evidence that Vrancke was employed inRogier’s workshop, and the fact that Vrancke inherited his own father’s workshop in1445 suggests that he may have been trained there. Even if we were to disassociatethe documented Vrancke van der Stockt from the painter of the Prado

Redemption

,the six drawings do not display a convincing unity of hand attributable to a singleartist. Whilst the rather crude pen drawing of

Christ at the Column

from Rotterdam(cat. 27) is apparently copied from the Prado altarpiece, it is hard to see it as beingby the same hand which created the London

Procession

(cat. 24) – clearly a talenteddraughtsman very close to Rogier – or that of the rather pedestrian copyist respons-ible for the Louvre’s

Christ Carried to the Tomb

(cat. 28).The matter is further complicated by the interpretation of the mysterious ‘mono-

gram’ (read as an ‘r’ by Dirk de Vos, but as a ‘p’ by the exhibition curators) whichappears in two of the drawings exhibited (cats 24 and 25) as representing Vrancke’ssignature. Thus, although the

Scupstoel

(cat. 23) is convincingly given to the samehand as the London

Procession

, because the latter bears the symbol, both drawings arehere attributed to Vrancke. Furthermore, as the Louvre’s

Crucifixion and Scenes fromthe Life of St Eligius

(cat. 25) also bears the same symbol, it is also given to Vrancke,despite being of wholly different quality to the accomplished hand responsible forthe

Procession

and

Scupstoel

. Given the disparity in style between the monogrammedworks, their attribution to a single artistic personality seems doubtful. It is perhapsmore likely that the symbol was simply a mark of ownership, rather than authorship.The fifteenth-century painter would have relied on a large stock of pattern drawings,some executed by his own hand, others inherited or acquired by other means. Thesewere a valued professional commodity, as the famous legal case of 1519–20 betweenAmbrosius Benson and Gerard David demonstrates: amongst the items whose owner-ship was disputed before the Bruges magistrates were a sketchbook and a numberof patterns, some of which Benson had hired from another painter. It thereforeseems reasonable to imagine that a painter would wish to denote his ownership ofhis patterns by marking them in some way, perhaps with a symbol such as the onediscussed here.

Given the ambiguous status of so many surviving Netherlandish drawings, it islaudable that the organizers of this unprecedented exhibition wished to use it as anopportunity to revise old assumptions and publicize new attributions. However, whilstone is reluctant to be critical in the face of their considerable achievement in gath-ering together so many significant loans, the decision to display the works on mono-graphic lines, rather than by theme or function meant that the visitor was all tooaware of the lack of certain key works. The most regrettable (but understandable)absence was Van Eyck’s annotated drawing of Cardinal Albergati from Dresden. Notonly is this a fundamental work in establishing Van Eyck’s drawn oeuvre, but it is alsothe sole preparatory study for a painting from the first half of the fifteenth century thatsurvives along with its final painting, the panel now in Vienna. A less monographic


285

format could have made such absences less noticeable and may have allowed moreexploration of some of the practical functions of drawings. The relationships, forinstance, between drawings and the underdrawn and painted surfaces of panels couldhave been investigated to a greater extent, as could the use and reuse of motifs indrawings and paintings.

Nevertheless, one of the joys of the exhibition was the opportunity to witness someof the range of purposes for which drawings were made. One saw, for example,instances in which painters were designing works to be executed in other media, notonly in sculpture, as in the

Scupstoel

, and perhaps the Goesian

Virgin and Child

(cat.37), but also for glass-painting: several roundel cartoons, including the beautiful

StJohn the Baptist

(cat. 35), tentatively attributed to the Master of the St HippolytusTriptych, were included in the Hugo van der Goes section. Drawings for manuscriptillumination, particularly of the ‘Ghent–Bruges’ school, produced in the wake of Vander Goes, were absent, though a much earlier, pre-Eyckian sheet,

The Taking of Christ

(cat. 1), closely related to contemporary illumination, provided the starting point forthe exhibition.

Most surviving Netherlandish drawings from this period are considered to becopies. Although clarifying the status of a drawing – differentiating the original fromthe copy – is a prime factor in disentangling attributions, the reasons why copyingwas such a fundamental part of workshop practice are also of key importance inunderstanding art production at this time. The two post-Eyckian copy drawings of theMaelbeke

Virgin

(the Vienna version of which was exhibited), in which the donorfigure is incomplete, may have been used as a successful Eyckian composition whichcould be shown to prospective clients and repeated with different donor portraitsinserted. The exquisite

Virgin and Child

(cat. 16) from Rotterdam was perhaps apattern made in Rogier van der Weyden’s workshop, and designed to be easilycopied, given its strong, precise contours, and incorporated into different settings.On the other hand, Rogier’s

Young Woman

(cat. 15) appears to be one of the few truepreparatory drawings by the master which survive. Rogier may have made his metic-ulous drawing because his client was unable to attend the several sittings a paintedportrait in oils would have demanded.

Some of the more ‘finished’ works exhibited also beg questions as to their func-tion. The status of Van der Goes’s important chiaroscuro

Jacob and Rachel

(cat. 30) iscertainly ambiguous. Was it a

patron

for a painting (perhaps a wall painting?), or anindependent work in its own right? It could, given its finished appearance, have beena presentation drawing, made to give a client an idea of a finished work. By contrast,Bosch’s loose, free drawing style is markedly different to that of his fellow artists inthe exhibition, and it is only his sheets which approach the modern concept of thespontaneous ‘sketch’. One wonders if Gerard David might have made a more fittingconclusion to the exhibition, given that his work is more closely attached to the late-medieval traditions of his predecessors. Maryan Ainsworth’s recent work has consid-erably enhanced our understanding of David’s use of drawings, and he is the one ofthe earliest Netherlandish artists for whom a sizeable corpus survives, some of whichclosely relates to extant paintings. His drawings have not been seen together in recentyears, whereas virtually all of Bosch’s drawn oeuvre was seen at the monographicexhibition of his work in Rotterdam in 2001.

286


The exhibition display was well spaced and adequately lit, affording the viewer areasonable view of the drawings without compromising their conservation require-ments. The exhibits were hung against sympathetic pale green walls, unencumberedby wall texts; instead of these (as with the Bruges exhibition earlier in the year),visitors were given an audio guide and a multilingual booklet that provided a shortcommentary on the four sections and a list of the exhibited works.

The exhibition catalogue is handsomely designed, with well-researched entries,preceded by a short introductory essay by Koreny and Zeman on the practice ofdrawing in the southern Netherlands in the fifteenth century. The plates of theexhibited drawings are of excellent quality (the only exception being that of theRotterdam

Virgin and Child

, which is blurred and overly reddish), and most are repro-duced at their actual size. There is a wealth of comparative illustrations, though someof these, particularly of drawings not exhibited, could have benefited from beinglarger and in colour. The extensive bibliography is unfortunately marred by occa-sional lapses in translation and careless omissions. John Hunter’s 1993

Art Bulletin

article, for example, which refutes the identification of Cardinal Albergati as the sitterin Van Eyck’s Dresden drawing and Vienna painting, is absent, despite being referredto (but not cited in full) in the essay preceding the Van Eyck section. Despite this,the book will remain an important source of reference for the understanding oflate-medieval Netherlandish drawings, and is a useful record of this memorableexhibition. One hopes that both book and exhibition will stimulate further interestin this often overlooked aspect of art production in the Southern Netherlands of thefifteenth century.

Courtauld Institute of Art

Douglas

Brine

Cosimo Rosselli, Painter of the Sistine Chapel (Cornell Fine Arts Museum,Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, 9 February–22 April 2001). Catalogueby A. Blumenthal, with contributions by S. Boorsch, V. Budny, F. Dabell, E.Fahy, W. Griswold, P. Nuttall, and A. Padoa Rizzo. Florida: Cornell Fine ArtsMuseum at Rollins College, 2001. 225 pp., 88 colour and 34 b & w illus.ISBN 0-9615828-2-0.

For students of Renaissance art, one of the more interesting, pleasurable, and unex-pected museum events of 2001 was the exhibition of paintings and prints (and onedrawing) by Cosimo Rosselli and his circle mounted by the Cornell Fine Arts Museumin central Florida. It is now widely assumed that loans of panel paintings are sodifficult to procure that monographic exhibitions of early Renaissance artists areall but impossible to organize. This occasion showed otherwise, proving as well thatthe monograph, whether panoramic or selective in scope, is still a viable format forthe advancement of scholarship, as had earlier exhibitions of Mantegna (Londonand New York), Petrus Christus (New York), Perugino (Grand Rapids), and Lucadi Tomme and Niccolo di Buonaccorso (San Diego). Sixteen paintings by CosimoRosselli were assembled on the walls of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, some of them


287

cleaned for this occasion, some rarely or never seen publicly before. Twenty-eightothers are reproduced in the catalogue, along with photographs and some remark-able details of the artist’s frescoes, making this by far the most complete and usefulpublication of his work ever attempted. The catalogue is also enriched by an extra-ordinarily detailed and original study of Rosselli’s family, artistic origins, and workingambience contributed by Frank Dabell and Virginia Budny, and by two invaluable listsof paintings attributed to Rosselli and to his cousin Bernardo di Stefano compiled byEverett Fahy. Suzanne Boorsch added a fresh and extremely useful discussion of theprints attributed to Cosimo Rosselli’s half-brother, Francesco; Cosimo’s few knowndrawings are reviewed by William Griswold, expanding upon a topic he first pub-lished elsewhere;

1

Paula Nuttall and Anna Padoa Rizzo also contributed versions ofessays presented elsewhere, discussing Cosimo Rosselli’s biography and his work forconfraternal patrons; the catalogue entries were provided by the show’s organizer,Arthur Blumenthal, director of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum.

Since at least the time of Vasari, Cosimo Rosselli has been held in relatively lowesteem alongside his eminent Florentine contemporaries. Highly successful andclearly appreciated in his own day – he was selected in 1481, alongside Botticelli,Ghirlandaio, and Perugino, as one of the principal contractors for the wall frescoesin the Sistine Chapel – Rosselli’s admirers since then have been few. He plays anegligible or non-existent role in most surveys of Florentine Quattrocento painting,and was conspicuous in his complete absence from the exhibition

Renaissance Florence:the Art of the 1470s

at the National Gallery, London, in 1999, an exhibition exemplaryfor its thorough and rigorous scholarship. Almost the only context in which Rossellihad previously commanded a reasonable measure of attention was the

Maestri e Bot-teghe

exhibition in Florence of 1992, an investigation of some of the more commercialaspects of art manufacture, in which he emerged in the company of fifteenth-centuryFlorentine craftsmen and artisans as a clearly defined and fascinating creative person-ality. The Cornell exhibition was not a direct attempt to redress this imbalance:questions of historicism, changing taste, cultural context, or meaning are not theprimary focus of its catalogue. No attempt was made either to explain the moderneclipse of Rosselli’s reputation or to rationalize the attitudes of fifteenth-centuryFlorentines who considered him, at least briefly, the peer of Botticelli and Ghir-landaio. This exhibition was conceived with neither an apologist nor a revisionistagenda, but rather as a straightforward celebration of the art of a frequently over-looked painter, a refreshingly non-polemical starting point that could profitably beapplied to a great many other artists as well.

Since Rosselli was trained, between 1453 and 1456, in the entrepreneurial work-shop of Neri di Bicci, where quality of materials, solidity of technique, and prompt-ness of execution were of more immediate value than originality of invention, it isimportant to establish the technical and manufacturing aspects of his production asa background for appreciating his art. Rosselli co-opted the numerous members ofhis extended family – as well as apprentices of no less stature than Piero di Cosimo,Fra Bartolommeo, and Mariotto Albertinelli (all of whom were represented in the

1

W. Griswold, ‘Cosimo Rosselli as a draughtsman’, in E. Cropper (ed.),

Florentine Drawing at the Time ofLorenzo the Magnificent

(Bologna, 1994), 83–90.

288


exhibition) – to help in the execution of his panel paintings and frescoes. He alsoresorted to other measures, such as freely replicating his own cartoons, to satisfy atan acceptable pace the demand for his works. An uneven level of quality in hisfrescoes has always been apparent to scholars, though few have troubled to analysethe causes or implications in any detail, or extend the observation to his altarpiecesor smaller devotional panels. Rosselli’s ‘assembly line’ mentality in constructing worksof art has proven highly prejudicial to his acceptance by modern audiences but wasentirely normal in his day. It surely derived from his experiences in Neri di Bicci’sstudio, where Cosimo himself must have fulfilled the role he would later assign to hisown chief assistants, though no attempts have yet been made to identify paintingsamong those routinely attributed to Neri that might reveal the hand and mind of theyounger and more talented artist.

In part, the problem of charting Rosselli’s emergence from Neri di Bicci’s studioafter 1456 is complicated by the complete absence of documented works by himearlier than the Saint Barbara altarpiece (Florence, Accademia) of 1468. But theproblem is circular. Conventional biographies neglect or deny any possible influencewhatsoever from Neri di Bicci, seeking instead to explain Rosselli’s development by ahypothetical attachment in the late 1450s either to Benozzo Gozzoli or to AlessoBaldovinetti. The latter theory is particularly tenacious in the literature, adducedto explain (among other things) the ‘wooden’ character of Rosselli’s figures byreference to Baldovinetti’s designs for intarsia panels to be executed by Giulianoda Majano. But Rosselli needed no painterly intermediary for an introduction toGiuliano da Majano and the stylistic peculiarities of intarsia decoration. Giuliano wasa regular collaborator of Neri di Bicci during the years that Rosselli spent as a

garzone

in that shop; Giuliano carved the frame for Rosselli’s Saint Barbara altarpiece and wasprobably instrumental in directing this prestigious commission to an otherwise little-known and untried painter; and commercial and social ties between these two artistsremained strong throughout their careers (Giuliano’s brother, the sculptor Bene-detto da Majano, married Rosselli’s sister-in-law in 1484, and Rosselli later served asan executor of Benedetto’s will). Rather than searching for fanciful traces of influ-ence from masters ‘worthy’ of his own later stature, such as Gozzoli or Baldovinetti,it would be far more fruitful to imagine Cosimo Rosselli’s activity in the late 1450sand early 1460s unfolding well within the orbits of Neri di Bicci and Giuliano daMajano, possibly opening a new line of enquiry into the more important altarpiecesand devotional panels assumed to be by Neri di Bicci but not mentioned by him inhis

Ricordanze

.

2

This experience, coupled with work – primarily architectural decora-tion – that he no doubt produced for his older brother Chimente (with whom heis documented in Pisa in 1465), bore fruit in the remarkable precision of paintedarchitectural details and the careful construction of pictorial space in the Saint

2

Two examples may be a triptych in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, certainly painted after 1450(Saint Bernardino, canonized in that year, is portrayed in the left wing) but not necessarily before 1453, theinitial date of the

Ricordanze

, and the altarpiece (now divided between the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, theAllen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, and the Accademia, Florence) from the Villani di Stoldo chapel inSantissima Annunziata, Florence. The latter is universally presumed to predate 1453, since it is not mentionedin the

Ricordanze

, yet circumstantial documentary evidence exists suggesting that it may have been commis-sioned in or shortly after 1454.


289

Barbara altarpiece, and may possibly explain the startling accomplishment andnovelty of the architectural setting in Rosselli’s undisputed masterpiece, the fresco ofthe

Last Supper

in the Sistine Chapel.How, when, or why Cosimo Rosselli was chosen to work among the team of artists

decorating the walls of the Pope’s personal chapel may always remain a mystery: themanner of selection of any of the artists involved in that singular campaign is notattested by any surviving document. If Perugino, who shouldered the lion’s share ofwork on the walls and who had earlier worked for Sixtus IV elsewhere in the Vatican,was responsible for calling in Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Rosselli to help him meetthe Pope’s unrealistic scheduling expectations, it would be necessary to find someprevious avenue of connection between the two masters. If instead the entire teamwas sent from Florence, perhaps as a diplomatic gesture by Lorenzo de’ Medici, ashas sometimes been claimed, could Giuliano da Majano have been the unseen con-nection among them? So many questions regarding the entire cycle of Sistine frescoesremain unanswered, not least of which are some basic issues of attribution andsequence within the larger corporate endeavour. Only recently, for example, has itbeen recognized that Cosimo Rosselli was not responsible for painting the

Crossing ofthe Red Sea

as Vasari claimed; but did Biagio d’Antonio, the real author of this fresco,design it himself or did he work from cartoons by Cosimo Rosselli or, as seems morelikely, Domenico Ghirlandaio? Biagio d’Antonio has also been recognized as assistingRosselli in the small background scenes visible through window openings in the

LastSupper, but did he paint all three of these or just two? And how did he come to beworking for Cosimo Rosselli, with whom he is last known to have had professionalcontacts ten years previously?

Each of the four contracting artists at work on the walls of the Sistine Chapel mademore liberal use of assistants, and of each other, than has traditionally been recog-nized. Sorting through these layers of intervention, which often occur in surprisinglyisolated passages, is crucial to a full analysis of the cycle. The apostle seated next toSaint John the Evangelist in the foreground of the Last Supper, for example, wasclearly not painted by Rosselli himself. Was this figure added by Biagio d’Antonio?Vasari claims that Piero di Cosimo, not Biagio d’Antonio, was Rosselli’s principalassistant in Rome, and modern scholarship, otherwise unable to pinpoint Piero diCosimo’s well-known eccentricities on the walls of the Sistine Chapel, vaguely assumesthat Piero was probably responsible for much of the landscape detail in Rosselli’sthree frescoes. But did he contribute figures there as well? Could the apostle in theLast Supper or some of the smaller background groups in Moses Receiving the Law onMount Sinai have been contributed by Piero di Cosimo? If so, is it possible to fill outthe still elusive early career of Piero by finding the same hand among panel paintingsgenerally attributed to Cosimo Rosselli? One clue may lie in the use of stippled goldhighlighting along the edges of trees, shrubs, and grassy knolls in the backgroundsof the Sistine frescoes, a technique (unjustly lampooned by Vasari) which does notfeature in Rosselli’s pre-Sistine works and only in a much modified fashion in his latepaintings. Yet it occurs in a form exactly parallel to the Sistine frescoes in the lyrical,almost miniaturist Lamentation over the Dead Christ from the Philadelphia Museum ofArt (Fig. 1), and its companion scenes of the Disrobing of Christ and the Via Crucisformerly in the Mount Trust. Notwithstanding the range of dates proposed for these

290 Reviews of exhibitions

paintings, from the early 1460s3 to the late 1490s4 (the exhibition catalogue opts forc. 1495), the only acceptable date for them is c. 1482, in immediate proximity to theSistine frescoes, where even the figures find an exact correspondence in the back-ground scenes in the fresco of Moses on Mount Sinai. The possibility that these panelsmay have been painted by Piero di Cosimo was made all the more intriguing in theexhibition by the presence nearby of Piero’s mysterious Building of a Palace from theRingling Museum in Sarasota (cat. 23), in which the figure style is not radicallydifferent from that in the Philadelphia panel.

One advantage a reviewer can alway claim over the compiler of an exhibition cata-logue is the opportunity to see all the catalogued works side by side before writing.In this case, the experience was crucial as previously available information aboutRosselli’s paintings was scanty, superficial, and sometimes incorrect or misleading.Cosimo Rosselli was a painstaking craftsman, and the richness and quality of histechnique in well-preserved paintings (the Adoration of the Christ Child from theColumbia Museum of Art [cat. 6] is so badly damaged and heavily restored that itsinclusion in the exhibition was a matter of little more than academic interest) maybe adduced as an indicator of their date. His earliest paintings, such as the remark-

3 R. Musatti, ‘Catalogo giovanile di Cosimo Rosselli’, Rivista d’Arte, xxvi/3 (1950), 103–30.4 A. Padoa Rizzo, ‘La Cappella Salutati nel Duomo di Fiesole e l’attività giovanile di Cosimo Rosselli’,

Antichità Viva, xvi/3 (1977), 3–12.

Fig. 1. Cosimo Rosselli, The Lamentation of Christ (The John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Reviews of exhibitions 291

ably beautiful Madonna and Child from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (cat. 5,unconvincingly dated 1476–8 rather than c. 1468),5 or the altarpiece fragment fromthe Huntington Library (cat. 2, exhibited alongside two further fragments [cats 3 and4] now in the Piero Corsini collection) are painted entirely in a conventional temperatechnique. His last works, by contrast, are painted in oil, and the best examples ofthese, such as the Holy Family tondo from Seattle (cat. 9) or the Visitation fromHartford (cat. 15), demonstrate how completely he had mastered the radically differ-ent demands of this medium, unlike some of his Florentine contemporaries, such asBotticelli, who never grew comfortable with these new materials. The range of hisdeveloping mastery spanning these two poles progresses from such tentative mixturesof tempera and oil as in the majestic Madonna and Child from the Philbrook Museumof Art (cat. 12), more likely to have been painted in the late 1470s, immediately beforethe Sistine commission, than c. 1495, as the catalogue prefers, to the more intimateMadonna in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (cat.11), with its uncharacteristic Venetian background,6 which probably dates from themid-1480s (Fig. 2). The crowning achievement of this transitional phase of the artist’scareer would be the surviving fragments of an altarpiece lent by the Museo Stibbert(cat. 13) and the Mint Museum of Art (cat. 14), plausibly datable to c. 1490. TheStibbert fragment, recently cleaned, is in an astonishingly pure state of preservation,rivalled in this sense among the panels included in the exhibition only by the BostonMadonna (cat. 5); both of these works for this reason deserve a higher place in thecanon of Renaissance painting than any of Rosselli’s efforts are commonly accorded.

The scope of an exhibition such as this, in a small college museum, can have roomfor no more than passing acknowledgement of the stature of Rosselli’s teacher – Neridi Bicci (cat. nos 18 and 19) – or pupils – Piero di Cosimo (cat. nos 22 and 23), FraBartolomeo (cat. no. 24), and Mariotto Albertinelli (cat. nos 25–7). Two other artistsincluded in the show, on the other hand, were accorded attention exactly com-mensurate with their talents. Bernardo di Stefano Rosselli, Cosimo’s cousin, was apunctilious artisan whose chief – perhaps exclusive – interest lies in his divulgationof Rossellian decorative motifs to a decidedly less demanding clientele than that ofhis better-known cousin (cat. nos 20 and 21; the catalogue expresses a justified

5 Efforts to date Cosimo Rosselli’s paintings without reference to their technique of execution must betreated with caution. For example, the preliminary study of his work by Edith Gabrielli (‘L’attività di CosimoRosselli dal primo soggiorno romano all’impresa sistina’, in S. Rossi and S. Valeri (eds), Le due Rome delQuattrocento [Rome, 1997], 127–47), in which she announces a much anticipated monograph, unaccountablyconsiders the Boston Madonna contemporary to the Friedsam Madonna at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,and conversely places the Boston Deposition in Rosselli’s early career, which is impossible.

6 The nature of Cosimo Rosselli’s familiarity with Venetian painting is an important topic yet to be inves-tigated in the literature. Not only does the background of the Lehman Madonna imply a first-hand knowledgeof the Venetian countryside, but also Rosselli’s habitual technique of painting panels designed to be insertedinto interchangeable frames, rather than complete with engaged mouldings, is specifically Venetian in originand exceptionally rare in mid-Quattrocento Florence. Rosselli’s familiarity with oil painting from the 1480sonwards, and the thoroughness of his eventual mastery of the technique, may also owe more than is currentlysuspected to the influence of Venetian painting. It is possible that Rosselli’s work for the German confrater-nities in Florence may have brought him into (or been occasioned by) contact with the larger and morepowerful German community in Venice. It should be noted that Cosimo’s half-brother Francesco settled inVenice during the latter half of his career, and must have passed through the Venetian Republic before 1480on his way to Hungary.


Fig. 2. Cosimo Rosselli, Madonna and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist (Robert Lehman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)


uncertainty regarding the attribution of the latter, which is omitted from Everett Fahy’slist of Bernardo di Stefano’s works and is likely to have been painted by another memberof the Rosselli family). Francesco Rosselli, Cosimo’s half-brother, was, in the words ofSuzanne Boorsch, ‘the foremost Florentine engraver of the end of the fifteenth andbeginning of the sixteenth century’. The eleven engravings by him exhibited here(cat. nos 28–38) offer a glimpse into the fairness of this remark, as well as a reminderof the relative quality and importance of this frequently overlooked medium withinthe larger panorama of the arts of the Renaissance. The question of Francesco’sproduction as a painter and illuminator, mentioned in documents but not yet con-vincingly associated with surviving works of art, remains to be addressed, but perhapsthis exhibition and its catalogue will serve as a basis from which such investigationscan soon be launched.

Robert Lehman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkLaurence B. Kanter

Correggio and Parmigianino: Master Draughtsmen of the Renaissance (TheBritish Museum, 6 October 2000–7 January 2001 and The MetropolitanMuseum, 5 February–6 May 2001). Catalogue by Carmen C. Bambach, H.Chapman, M. Clayton, and George R. Goldner. London: British MuseumPress, 2000. 192 pp. ISBN 0-7141-2628-4.

The exhibition Correggio and Parmigianino: Master Draughtsmen of the Renais-sance, held at the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum, was an importantone for students of Renaissance art. It left for posterity a valuable and originalcatalogue by a team of leading drawings curators. The format of the publicationis large, but the concise entries are, admirably, more in the spirit of older BritishMuseum exhibition catalogues than the over-inflated books that now accompanymost shows.

The selection for this exhibition was strictly confined to English and Americancollections – a reflection perhaps of the problems faced by all museums in the cur-rent marketplace for loans. Thankfully, in the case of Correggio and Parmigianino,the ability of the organizers to represent major commissions and the varied concernsof these artists was not affected by the restricted pool of lending institutions, despitethe fact that some of their most important drawings, principally from the Louvre inParis, the Uffizi in Florence, and the Albertina in Vienna, could not be included.Conversely, given the depth and richness of holdings in Britain and the USA, moretreatment of the followers of these two artists might have been expected in thecatalogue, as they were in Diane De Grazia’s exhibition devoted to Emilian drawingsheld in Washington and Parma in 1984. However, no one who saw this beautiful showcould have been disappointed by the purer approach.

Considering how much English and American connoisseurs and art historians havedone to promote and sustain the study of Old Master drawings in general, the con-centration on the collections of those two countries was somehow appropriate. It wasalso fitting that the British Museum was one of the venues for this show, given that


the drawings of both Correggio and Parmigianino were first treated seriously by A. E.Popham, a former keeper at the museum, in major publications of 1957 and 1971.Indeed, it may not be well known that Popham purchased drawings as an agent forthe National Gallery of Canada from 1960, including three examples by Parmi-gianino, though, sadly for Ottawa, no Correggio. Given this direct historical con-nection between Popham and North America, it was a shame that Ottawa could nothave been considered as a lender to the exhibition.

In addition to individual entries for each object, the catalogue is anchored bysymmetrical essays on the drawing styles of the two artists. Such is the current richnessof scholarship on these painters that important new monographs on the drawings ofCorreggio and Parmigianino appeared too late to be discussed in this catalogue.1 Theexhibition provided an opportunity to compare the graphic output of two artistsrelated more by geography and cultural background than by mature career choicesor patronage. Given that together they transformed the regional town of Parma intoan indisputable centre for artistic production in Italy, the contrast between theirdrawings is striking. Indeed, while it is conventional to observe how much Correggioinfluenced the unbelievably precocious Parmigianino, another fruitful line of enquirywould be to analyse working practices that the two held in common through theirheritage in Parma, not least because Parmigianino was born into a local artisticdynasty, the family members of which must also have been competent draughtsman.Correggio’s most enthralling sketches are those constructed in thick layers using avariety of graphic media, often in the manner of small paintings, whereas Parmi-gianino is more consistently impressive, with characteristically cleaner, purer drawingsin his preferred medium of pen and ink. While Parmigianino as a young artist emu-lated Correggio’s red chalk handling and use of tinted grounds, he was apparentlymore comfortable with the pen, whether free and unconstrained, or accurate andelliptical. It is in this drawing medium, so critical to the immediate recording of visualthoughts, that the two artists are not technically compatible or comparable.

The older artist Correggio can hardly be considered marginalized, to judge by theabundant scholarship on the artist; but because he did not work in Venice, Rome, orFlorence, there may always be a tendency to overlook him in synthetic accounts ofRenaissance painting. Therefore, the juxtaposition of his graphic work with Parmi-gianino’s in this exhibition did him a service by demonstrating to a wide public andspecialists alike the comparable quality of his drawings to those relatively more famil-iar ones by Parmigianino. While it is only a generalization, Correggio’s drawings,especially those finer and more modulated ones in red chalk, reveal an artist with anexquisite, highly distilled style who could treat human form with a disarming sensu-ality. Correggio usually composed his drawings in relief-like planes of chalk and pensuperimposed with an abundant white heightening, rather than by building up forminternally through contour lines and hatching like Parmigianino. At times, the almostfrantic use of line in Correggio’s drawings can be positively startling (see Fig. 1), anapproach Parmigianino tended to avoid. Where Correggio’s approach certainly didprovide a direct model for Parmigianino was in the production of sophisticated

1 Mario Di Giampaolo, Correggio: disegnatore as Draughtsman (Correggio, 2001); S. Béguin, M. Di Giampaolo,and M. Vaccaro, Parmigianino. I Disegni (Turin and London, 2000).


Fig. 1. Correggio, Madonna and Child with Saints (Christ Church College, Oxford)


designs for specific chapel settings that required adjustments in perspective for thepurposes of illusion.

Exceptionally, as many as 1000 drawings by Parmigianino survive, making it pos-sible, as with few artists of his epoch, to document the full range of his interests bothas a designer and an observer. Conversely, as only about 100 Correggio drawings arenow known, it is more contentious to make generalizations about his overall practice.It is nevertheless useful to recall this ratio, since Correggio probably made a greatervariety of sketches than can now be documented. Parmigianino’s meticulous pen-and-ink sketches were so valued by earlier dealers and collectors that these studies werebroken up and recomposed into several ‘new’ but smaller sheets more frequentlythan for other Renaissance artists. This not only made his drawings tidier and somore acceptable to contemporary taste, but it would also have increased their overallmarket value for an unscrupulous owner. In this exhibition, the most obvious victimsare the studies for the Steccata, in Christ Church, Oxford (cats 107–9, 110–13), whichwere in this instance dismembered as early as the seventeenth century, as pointed outin the catalogue. Thus it should be remembered that the 1000 drawings that survivefrom Parmigianino’s hand in reality represents a smaller number of sheets.

Later butchering of his drawings notwithstanding, Parmigianino does seem to havebeen an unusually keen draughtsman, who frequently developed different projects onthe same sheet of paper. This exhibition featured different categories of independentdrawings by Parmigianino, including genre, animal, portrait, landscape, presentationsheets, and copies after other artists, not to mention those compelling self-portraitsrecording his own handsome face (Fig. 2). No obvious examples of these types arenow known from Correggio’s hand. Unlike his older colleague, Parmigianino madedrawings for engravings and chiaroscuro woodcuts (and even more unusually madeetchings himself ); the preservation and proliferation of his designs in these mediareveals his belief in the integrity and importance of his graphic oeuvre as evidence ofhis unique talents. Drawings by Parmigianino also survive in a greater variety oftechniques, including metalpoint, watercolour, and coloured chalks, although whetherhe was technically as experimental as is suggested in the catalogue is a matter ofdebate. This observation relates to two different fields, one involving coloured washesand the other pastels. While studies such as the ravaged one for the Steccata vault atChatsworth (cat. 105), modelled with yellow, mauve, and green applied washes, aswell as red heightening, might at first seem to indicate the artist anticipating paintedeffects in his drawings, the close relationship of these hues to the finished fresco mayequally betray a collector or restorer who, aware of the original painting, was attempt-ing to simulate its tonal effects by colouring a less finished drawing in pen and brownink. Also still somewhat tendentious is the notion that Parmigianino (following theexample of Leonardo in Milan) was a pioneer in the use of pastel in combinationwith natural chalks (see p. 19 and fig. 5). If, by pastel, one means a fabricated chalkmixed with a binding medium, as opposed to naturally occurring chalks of differentcolours with a restricted range, this seems problematic.2 In both cases, further studyin conjunction with paper conservators would be welcome.

2 See the warnings about distinguishing chalk and pastel in T. Burns, ‘Chalk or pastel?: The use of colouredmedia in early drawings’, Paper Conservator, xvii (1994), 49–56.


Fig. 2. Parmigianino, Self-portrait with two Canephori (Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth)


Curiously, to judge from what survives, neither Parmigianino nor Correggioappears to have made many drawings from a posed model in the studio. AlthoughParmigianino was capable of the most objective studies from nature, he does notseem to have treated human form with the same scrutiny, which is perhaps surprisingconsidering the figural distortions present in his paintings. Rarely does one find adrawing by him unequivocally after a model in the workshop (cat. 68 is a single, butnot totally uncontroversial, instance). Considering that life drawing was the staple ofFlorentine workshop practice, this lack is not without significance, suggesting thatdrawing procedures in Parma were likely to have been less systematic and categoricalthan in Tuscany. Indeed, this may help to explain the significant variations betweenthe drawings of Correggio and Parmigianino observed above. Similarly, Correggio’stendency to produce drawings with a dense finish suggests he was attempting to useindividual studies for multiple purposes, where a Florentine artist would have madeseparate drafts. It is worth emphasizing that the current vocabulary for discussingdrawings is derived from Florentine and Roman practice, as exemplified by the worksof Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, which involved artists working in a logical progressionfrom small sketches setting down an original invention, through compositional draw-ings made in conjunction with anatomical, figure, and drapery studies, all leading upto the production of the scale cartoon made for transfer to the final support. Implicitin this system was the assumption that at the conclusion of such a methodical andextended drawing sequence, less effort would be required to make a finished paint-ing (which could often then be delegated to assistants). This was certainly not theattitude of Correggio and Parmigianino, who would still have regarded the act ofpainting as quite independent and indeed liberated from drawing on paper.

Popham’s approach to connoisseurship is reputed to be inclusive: a number of thedrawings he catalogued as autograph in his three-volume monograph on Parmi-gianino have been reattributed or classed as copies (even within the text of thiscatalogue). However, the corpus is probably still too extended. While caution shouldbe exercised when challenging a drawing’s attribution (recent examples inMichelangelo and Raphael studies have demonstrated that a sheet can be consignedto a critical limbo from which it may take a long time to be rehabilitated), a fewdrawings catalogued here did raise questions. A drawing in red chalk on badlybleached paper in the Courtauld Institute of a tensely rearing horse seems, to judgeby its dense, linear hatching, certainly to be Florentine and executed around themiddle of the sixteenth century. Also by a Florentine artist is a pen-and-ink drawingin Washington of two antique torsos with a fragment of poetry (cat. 52). This sketchis doubtless by Jacone, who was a follower of Sarto and Pontormo: it compares wellwith one by him of a seated figure in the Ashmolean Museum, dated 1527, originallycatalogued by Parker as Tribolo. The rough script does not compare precisely withParmigianino’s rather more tidy calligraphy, familiar on many of his sheets. Moreawkward as a work of art is a black chalk sketch (cat. 53) of a section of landscape:there is no obvious parallel among Parmigianino’s drawings for this unstructured,pendular stroke and it does not rest well in his oeuvre. At the opposite end of hiscareer, the distinction between his drawing style and that of imitators such as Bertoiaand Bedoli will always be a subject for debate. For example, if a drawing in theAccademia Carrara in Bergamo for a devotional painting by Bedoli in Munich really


is by that artist, who was roughly the same age as Parmigianino, it is difficult tounderstand why the drawing of an artist’s studio in the Morgan Library in New York(cat. 118), with its sharp pen work and shallow treatment of the space, should not befrom the same hand and so not by Parmigianino.

In the final analysis, the most original achievement of the catalogue is not thediscovery of new drawings or the rejection of others, but its sensitivity in writing aboutthe objects to other issues such as function, technique, scale, and subject matter.Exhibitions of this kind are possible because drawings have popular appeal, beingassociated with autography and signature, and promising – in their apparent sponta-neity – to reveal more of an artist’s true personality. Parmigianino is the epitome ofan artist who constantly expressed himself non-deductively through graphic media.Yet directness of execution can be deceptive, for often it is a drawing’s intendedfunction more than its spontaneous creativity that influences its appearance (even ifin the case of these Emilian artists it is difficult to be categorical about their attitudetowards preparatory sketches). Certainly drawings do not reveal an artist’s personalityso easily as to make attributions on the basis of style a straightforward procedure inevery case. The focus on more utilitarian issues, such as the purpose for which adrawing was made, as opposed to its attribution and quality, is what most distinguishesdrawings scholarship since Popham’s time, and this development is amply reflectedin this excellent catalogue, which will without doubt become a standard referencework in the future study of these two artists.

The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa David Franklin

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