Lot Essay
The sheet was first attributed to Raffaello da Montelupo by Professor J. Q. van Regteren Altena and this was recently confirmed for the recto by Dr. Paul Joannides who, however, feels that the verso may be by another hand.
Dr. Joannides (to whom we are grateful for his assistance in cataloguing this lot) believes the recto to be a copy of a lost drawing made by Michelangelo in preparation for the painting on slate of the Pietà, commissioned, probably in 1533, from his friend Sebastiano del Piombo by the Gonzaga family for Francisco de los Cobos, secretary of Emperor Charles V, M. Lucco, Sebastiano del Piombo, Milan, 1980, no. 94 illustrated. The painting is still in the Cobos family chapel in Ubeda. Two drawings by Michelangelo for this project survive: one in the Casa Buonarroti (CB.69F), and the other in the Louvre (Inv. 716, with a provenance from the Casa Buonarroti), M. Lucco, op.cit., figs. 941 and 942. Both are in black chalk: the former is very close in style to Michelangelo's figure sketches for the Last Judgement: the latter is highly finished, almost to the level of Michelangelo's presentation drawings. Both drawings, like Sebastiano's painting, show Christ's head tipped backwards. The present drawing, with Christ's head falling forward, corresponds in this respect to the antique source which Michelangelo employed (identified by M.V. Brugnoli Pace, Un modello antico e dei disegni attribuiti a Michelangelo, in Essays in the History of Art presented to Rudolf Wittkower, D. Fraser, H. Hibbard and M.J. Lewine, London, 1967, pp. 104-9) and would therefore copy a drawing made by Michelangelo before the two that survive. The motif of Christ's head falling forward was later taken up by Salviati in his Pietà in the Chapel of the Margrave in the church of Santa Maria dell'Anima, Rome, and in several related drawings: he may well have known Michelangelo's first idea.
In 1533-4 Raffaello was working with Michelangelo in the New Sacristy of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence, for which he carved the statue of San Damiano. During this period he certainly had access to Michelangelo's drawings and made a number of copies of them invariably in pen, a medium in every case different from Michelangelo's originals. Examples include the copy in the Royal Collection, Windsor (A.E. Popham and J. Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle, London, 1949, no. 787, illustrated) of the Fall of Phaeton and one in the Ashmolean Museum (K.T. Parker, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum: Italian Drawings, Oxford, 1956, II, no. 410) of Michelangelo's Bacchanal of Infants, also now at Windsor. Raffaello, like Leonardo da Vinci, was left-handed, a fact of which he was very proud and which had surprised Michelangelo and Sebastiano when they first met him. He writes, in his autobiography, that while he was drawing in the Colosseum, the two artists 'stopped a long time to look at me, marvelling much at a case which, so far as one knows, had never occurred before among painters and sculptors'. B. Berenson, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Chicago and London, 1938, figs. 814-832, lists eighteen drawings which he gives to Raffaello, on the basis of a group of sheets in the Uffizi (1225E-1231E) which bear an old attribution to the artist. All, like the present drawing, show left-handed hatching.
Dr. Joannides (to whom we are grateful for his assistance in cataloguing this lot) believes the recto to be a copy of a lost drawing made by Michelangelo in preparation for the painting on slate of the Pietà, commissioned, probably in 1533, from his friend Sebastiano del Piombo by the Gonzaga family for Francisco de los Cobos, secretary of Emperor Charles V, M. Lucco, Sebastiano del Piombo, Milan, 1980, no. 94 illustrated. The painting is still in the Cobos family chapel in Ubeda. Two drawings by Michelangelo for this project survive: one in the Casa Buonarroti (CB.69F), and the other in the Louvre (Inv. 716, with a provenance from the Casa Buonarroti), M. Lucco, op.cit., figs. 941 and 942. Both are in black chalk: the former is very close in style to Michelangelo's figure sketches for the Last Judgement: the latter is highly finished, almost to the level of Michelangelo's presentation drawings. Both drawings, like Sebastiano's painting, show Christ's head tipped backwards. The present drawing, with Christ's head falling forward, corresponds in this respect to the antique source which Michelangelo employed (identified by M.V. Brugnoli Pace, Un modello antico e dei disegni attribuiti a Michelangelo, in Essays in the History of Art presented to Rudolf Wittkower, D. Fraser, H. Hibbard and M.J. Lewine, London, 1967, pp. 104-9) and would therefore copy a drawing made by Michelangelo before the two that survive. The motif of Christ's head falling forward was later taken up by Salviati in his Pietà in the Chapel of the Margrave in the church of Santa Maria dell'Anima, Rome, and in several related drawings: he may well have known Michelangelo's first idea.
In 1533-4 Raffaello was working with Michelangelo in the New Sacristy of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence, for which he carved the statue of San Damiano. During this period he certainly had access to Michelangelo's drawings and made a number of copies of them invariably in pen, a medium in every case different from Michelangelo's originals. Examples include the copy in the Royal Collection, Windsor (A.E. Popham and J. Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle, London, 1949, no. 787, illustrated) of the Fall of Phaeton and one in the Ashmolean Museum (K.T. Parker, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum: Italian Drawings, Oxford, 1956, II, no. 410) of Michelangelo's Bacchanal of Infants, also now at Windsor. Raffaello, like Leonardo da Vinci, was left-handed, a fact of which he was very proud and which had surprised Michelangelo and Sebastiano when they first met him. He writes, in his autobiography, that while he was drawing in the Colosseum, the two artists 'stopped a long time to look at me, marvelling much at a case which, so far as one knows, had never occurred before among painters and sculptors'. B. Berenson, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Chicago and London, 1938, figs. 814-832, lists eighteen drawings which he gives to Raffaello, on the basis of a group of sheets in the Uffizi (1225E-1231E) which bear an old attribution to the artist. All, like the present drawing, show left-handed hatching.