Academy of a semi-nude man with one knee resting

Details

ATTRIBUTED TO BARTOLOMEO CESI (BOLOGNA 1556-1629)
Academy of a semi-nude man with one knee resting
with numbered ‘53’ (upper right)
red chalk
39.8 x 25.6 cm (15 5/8 x 10 1/8 in.)

Provenance

Private collection, Florence, 17th or 18th Century, possibly Giuseppe Santini.
Comte Eugène d’Oultremont (1879-1946), Château de Presles, Belgium; thence by descent.
Anonymous sale; Christie’s, London, 12 December 1985, lot 202 (as Matteo Rosselli).
with Marcello Aldega, Rome, and Margot Gordon, New York (Italian Drawings of the XVI Century, 1986, no. 40, ill.).
Private collection, Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Private Collection, U.S.A.

Literature

A. Graziani, F. Abbate and M. di Giampaolo, Bartolomeo Cesi, Bussero, 1988, p. 156, fig. 84 (as Bartolomeo Cesi).
A. Zacchi, ‘Bartolomeo Cesi fra tarda maniera e riforma caraccesca: nuove proposte per il catalogo dei disegni’, in Arte cristiana, LXXIX, March-April 1991, p.120 (as Bartolomeo Cesi).
A. Zacchi, ‘Bartolomeo Cesi disegnatore’, in Bartolomeo Cesi e l’affresco dei Canonici Lateranensi, Fiesole, 1997, p. 135 (as Bartolomeo Cesi).

Exhibited

Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste. Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, 2000, unpaginated.

Conditions of sale

Brought to you by

Annabel Kishor Specialist

akishor@christies.com +44 (0) 20 7389 2709

Lot Essay

The attribution to Matteo Rosselli was suggested by an inscription on the old mount. Subsequent authors have identified this sheet as the work of the Bolognese artist Bartolomeo Cesi (see most recently Zacchi, op. cit., 1997). Having studied with the Carracci, Cesi often drew from life, using workshop assistants as his models. The artist’s biographer, Giulio Cesare Malvasia, writes how Cesi’s figure drawings were particularly appreciated by collectors in his own time.

More from Old Master and British Drawings and Watercolours

View All