Lot Essay
This sheet is an important example of Giuseppe Porta’s small surviving corpus of drawings. The artist was born in Tuscany, but started his career in Rome with the Florentine painter Francesco Salviati, whose name he later adopted. Master and pupil moved together to Venice in 1539 where Porta soon established himself as a fresco painter of façade decorations. Unfortunately none of these works has survived. In technique, format and size, the drawing closely relates to another sheet by the artist in the British Museum representing The Taking of Samson (inv. 1950,0727.1; see D. McTavish, Giuseppe Porta called Giuseppe Salviati, New York and London, 1981, no. 13, fig. 152). It has been suggested that both works could have been compositions for a now-lost façade decoration or, perhaps, preparatory studies for chiaroscuro woodcuts (McTavish, op. cit., 2004, p. 337).
The drawing is mounted on an 18th Century collector’s mat, on the backing of which is a long handwritten biographical note in Dutch. The author has been identified as the politician, dealer, connoisseur, and collector Willem Anne Lestevenon. Lestevenon, who was born in Paris and later settled in Haarlem, acted as an agent for the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, acquiring on its behalf the collection of drawings of Queen Christina of Sweden from the Odescalchi family in Rome. Lestevenon also bought drawings for his own collection, as here (see B. de Moustier, ‘The Italian drawings collection of the Marquis de Lagoy’, Master Drawings, XLVI, no. 2, Summer 2008, pp. 193-198). Lestevenon believed this sheet was a work of Porta’s Venetian contemporary, Andrea Schiavone; his inscription on the backing is indeed a short biographical note on Schiavone.
The drawing is mounted on an 18th Century collector’s mat, on the backing of which is a long handwritten biographical note in Dutch. The author has been identified as the politician, dealer, connoisseur, and collector Willem Anne Lestevenon. Lestevenon, who was born in Paris and later settled in Haarlem, acted as an agent for the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, acquiring on its behalf the collection of drawings of Queen Christina of Sweden from the Odescalchi family in Rome. Lestevenon also bought drawings for his own collection, as here (see B. de Moustier, ‘The Italian drawings collection of the Marquis de Lagoy’, Master Drawings, XLVI, no. 2, Summer 2008, pp. 193-198). Lestevenon believed this sheet was a work of Porta’s Venetian contemporary, Andrea Schiavone; his inscription on the backing is indeed a short biographical note on Schiavone.