.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This and the following nine drawings once belonged to Pope Clement XI, known for his great interest in archaeology; the powerful and learned Cardinal Alessandro Albani, patron of the art historian Johan Joachim Winckelmann and the artist Anton Raphael Mengs; and King George III of England; but even more fascinating is their origin in the formidably ambitious project of the seventeenth-century Italian scholar and patron of the arts, Cassiano dal Pozzo. Together with his younger brother Carlo Antonio, Cassiano started around 1615 to assemble an enormous number of drawings and prints to document buildings, monuments, works of art and customs of the past, especially antiquity, but also of illustrations from the natural world, and to organise them to form his Museum chartaceum, or ‘Paper museum’. An indication of the scale of Cassiano’s undertaking is given by the fact that an entire volume of nearly 120 drawings was dedicated to citrus fruit (catalogued in Freedberg and Baldini, op. cit., nos. 1-118, ill.), of which three sheets are offered here (lots 22-24).
Much of Cassiano’s paper collection, which consisted of over 7000 sheets, ended up in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, the British Museum and the Institut de France, enabling a thorough study of its scope, and resulting in the ongoing publication of the drawings and prints in a multi-volume catalogue. The main repository of the extant bird drawings is the Royal Collection, but nearly half of them – and among them, many of the most beautiful and largest sheets – were dispersed at some time after the First World War, and are now scattered over a great number of private and a handful of public collections (H. McBurney, ‘History and contents of the dal Pozzo collection in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle’, in Cassiano dal Pozzo. Atti del Seminario Internazionale di Studi, Rome, 1989, p. 81.)
Cassiano’s plan seems to have been to have the drawings engraved and published in the form of books. While that ambition was never to be fully realised, a book devoted to birds did appear (L’uccelliera, published in Rome in 1622, written for Cassiano by Giovanni Pietro Olina), while drawings of citrus fruit were engraved for Giovanni Battista Ferrari’s Hesperides sive de malorum aureorum cultura et usu (Rome, 1646). Many of the etchings in L’uccelliera were based on watercolours by the draughtsman also responsible for the present sheets, Vincenzo Leonardi. A pupil of the painter and etcher Antonio Tempesta, Leonardi accompanied Cassiano on a trip to France in 1625 and worked for him until the end of his life (H. McBurney and C. Violani, The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo. A Catalogue Raisonné. Series B. Natural History. Parts Four and Five. Birds, Other Animals and Natural Curiosities, I, London, 2017, pp. 61-65, and passim). While he also drew antiquities for Cassiano’s Museum, his main talent seems to have been for depicting natural history. The two drawings of birds presented here (lots 25, 26) do not correspond to any of the plates in L’uccelliera and probably made after its publication, while the Leonardi’s three drawings of lemons and a lemon twig (lost 22-24) correspond with plates in the 1646 publication. Preserved on the mounts on which Cassiano’s drawings were laid after they entered the Royal Collection in the eighteenth century, they demonstrate Leonardi’s talent, as they balance accurate representation of the fruit and birds with artistic sensitivity and refinement of execution.
Much of Cassiano’s paper collection, which consisted of over 7000 sheets, ended up in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, the British Museum and the Institut de France, enabling a thorough study of its scope, and resulting in the ongoing publication of the drawings and prints in a multi-volume catalogue. The main repository of the extant bird drawings is the Royal Collection, but nearly half of them – and among them, many of the most beautiful and largest sheets – were dispersed at some time after the First World War, and are now scattered over a great number of private and a handful of public collections (H. McBurney, ‘History and contents of the dal Pozzo collection in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle’, in Cassiano dal Pozzo. Atti del Seminario Internazionale di Studi, Rome, 1989, p. 81.)
Cassiano’s plan seems to have been to have the drawings engraved and published in the form of books. While that ambition was never to be fully realised, a book devoted to birds did appear (L’uccelliera, published in Rome in 1622, written for Cassiano by Giovanni Pietro Olina), while drawings of citrus fruit were engraved for Giovanni Battista Ferrari’s Hesperides sive de malorum aureorum cultura et usu (Rome, 1646). Many of the etchings in L’uccelliera were based on watercolours by the draughtsman also responsible for the present sheets, Vincenzo Leonardi. A pupil of the painter and etcher Antonio Tempesta, Leonardi accompanied Cassiano on a trip to France in 1625 and worked for him until the end of his life (H. McBurney and C. Violani, The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo. A Catalogue Raisonné. Series B. Natural History. Parts Four and Five. Birds, Other Animals and Natural Curiosities, I, London, 2017, pp. 61-65, and passim). While he also drew antiquities for Cassiano’s Museum, his main talent seems to have been for depicting natural history. The two drawings of birds presented here (lots 25, 26) do not correspond to any of the plates in L’uccelliera and probably made after its publication, while the Leonardi’s three drawings of lemons and a lemon twig (lost 22-24) correspond with plates in the 1646 publication. Preserved on the mounts on which Cassiano’s drawings were laid after they entered the Royal Collection in the eighteenth century, they demonstrate Leonardi’s talent, as they balance accurate representation of the fruit and birds with artistic sensitivity and refinement of execution.