FRANCESCO DE’ ROSSI, CALLED FRANCESCO SALVIATI (FLORENCE 1510-1563 ROME)
FRANCESCO DE’ ROSSI, CALLED FRANCESCO SALVIATI (FLORENCE 1510-1563 ROME)
FRANCESCO DE’ ROSSI, CALLED FRANCESCO SALVIATI (FLORENCE 1510-1563 ROME)
FRANCESCO DE’ ROSSI, CALLED FRANCESCO SALVIATI (FLORENCE 1510-1563 ROME)
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Property from the Collection of Dr. Corinne Bronfman
FRANCESCO DE’ ROSSI, CALLED FRANCESCO SALVIATI (FLORENCE 1510-1563 ROME)

A nude man in profile to the left (recto); A nude youth seen from the back, pointing upwards (verso)

Details
FRANCESCO DE’ ROSSI, CALLED FRANCESCO SALVIATI (FLORENCE 1510-1563 ROME)
A nude man in profile to the left (recto); A nude youth seen from the back, pointing upwards (verso)
with inscriptions ‘Michel’ angelo Buonaroti’ (verso, lower right)
black chalk, pen and brown ink, watermark ladder in a shield surmounted by a star, top corners cut
16 5⁄8 x 10 3⁄8 in. (43 x 27.8 cm)
Provenance
Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680), London (L. 2092).
Anonymous sale (‘a Lady resident abroad’); Sotheby’s, London, 28 October 1936, lot 24 (as Michelangelo); where acquired by
Walter Gernsheim (1909-2006), Munich, United Kingdom and Switzerland.
with Colnaghi, London (Old Master Drawings, 1955, no. 20, as Baccio Bandinelli).
with Charles E. Slatkin Galleries, New York.
Gerald Bronfman (1911-1986) and Marjorie Bronfman, née Schechter (1917-2012), Montreal; by descent to
Corinne Bronfman (1947-2022), Washington DC; by descent to the present owners.
Literature
D. McTavish, ‘Review. Francesco Salviati o la Bella Maniera (Exhibition Catalogue) by Catherine Monbeig Goguel’, Master Drawings, XXXVIII, no. 1, Spring 2000, p. 67, ill.
C. Monbeig Goguel, ‘Francesco Salviati et La Bella Maniera quelques points à revoir interprétation, chronologie, attributions’, in Francesco Salviati et La Bella Maniera. Actes des colloques de Rome et de Paris (1998), Rome, pp. 54-55.
Exhibited
Iowa City, University of Iowa, Drawing and the Human Figure, 1400-1964, 1964, no. 12, ill. (as Bandinelli; catalogue by W. Tomasini).
Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the Renaissance in Florence, 2005, no. 118, ill. (entry by D. McTavish).

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Giada Damen, Ph.D.
Giada Damen, Ph.D. AVP, Specialist, Head of Sale

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Lot Essay

This double-sided study of male nudes is a powerful demonstration of Francesco Salviati’s exceptional skills as a draftsman. With incisive line and curvilinear hatching, the artist drew on each side of the paper a vigorous figure, revealing the calligraphic virtuosity and elegant refinement characteristic of his style. Already as a child, Salviati ‘did nothing else but draw’, as noted by the sixteenth-century historian Vincenzo Borghini (quoted in McTavish, op. cit., p. 66). Arguably even more than his paintings, it is the rich corpus of his drawings, executed in a great variety of techniques, that attests to the artist’s abilities and virtuosity.

In the 17th Century, the drawing under discussion was part of the collection of the painter and avid collector of drawings Peter Lely; possibly even earlier is the old inscription attributing it to Michelangelo. Later, the drawing was given to the Venetian Battista Franco, and then to the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli. In his youth, around 1526-1527, Salviati spent time in Bandinelli’s workshop, and his pen studies of the human figure betray this period of training with the older master, who himself executed many energetic studies of the male nude (see Monbeig Goguel, op. cit., p. 53). The limits between the graphic output of the two draftsmen has been the object of scholarly investigation for a long time, as Bandinelli’s technique and sculptural manner had a great impact on Salviati’s work as well as on that of his other pupils. Bandinelli had an almost obsessive fascination with Michelangelo’s David, and the study of the male nude was at the center of much of his practice. Similarly, Salviati throughout his career focused many of his efforts to the powerful rendering of the human body, always depicted in new and sophisticated postures. His work was grounded in observation from life, though: Giorgio Vasari recounts how Salviati and he studied nudes together from life in public bathhouses and made anatomical studies in the cemetery (McTavish in op. cit., Ottawa, 2005, p. 322).

Another double-sided sheet by Salviati, a recent acquisition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 2021.69), is closely related to the work under discussion (figs. 1, 2; see C. Monbeig Goguel in Francesco Salviati ou la Bella Maniera, exhib. cat., Rome, Villa Medici, and Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1998, no. 15, ill.). The two drawings are close to identical in scale, technique, and subject, so much so that they must have been produced at the same time. Because of the strong sculptural qualities of the nudes, the drawing at the Metropolitan Museum was attributed by John Pope-Hennessy to the sculptor Bartolomeo Ammanati (J. Pope-Hennessy, Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture, London, 1963, I, p. 75).

The two male figures drawn on the recto and verso of the present sheet –one seen from the back and the other in profile, and both captured in dramatic and emphatic postures – cannot be related to any of the known painted compositions by Salviati. However, David McTavish pointed out that a figure in a posture quite close to the man seen from behind on the verso of the drawing offered here appears in the foreground of a drawing in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford representing the Death of the Children of Niobe (inv. WA 1863.674; see P. Costamagna in in Francesco Salviati ou la Bella Maniera, exhib. cat., op. cit., no. 74, ill.) and translated into print in 1541 probably by Girolamo Fagiuoli (fig. 3; see S. Boorsch, ‘Salviati and Prints. The Question of Fagiuoli’, in Francesco Salviati et La Bella Maniera. Actes des colloques de Rome et de Paris (1998), Rome, pp. 515-516).

Figs. 1, 2. Francesco Salviati, Seated nude youth, facing left (recto); Bearded nude male figure in a half-kneeling pose, holding drapery behind his back (verso). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Fig. 3. Girolamo Fagiuoli, after Francesco Salviati, The Death of the Children of Niobe. Engraving. The Art Institute of Chicago.

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