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Lot Essay
The drawing has been recognized as an autograph work by the Florentine Giovanni Battista Naldini by Elizabeth Pilliod and Anna Forlani Tempesti (communications to the owner).
The crowded scene, drawn in pen and ink, on the recto of the sheet is difficult to interpret; it is perhaps a scene of investiture. The graphic style and the vertical format of the composition, with numerous figures gravitating around the center of the scene, are characteristic of Naldini’s work. The verso of the sheet shows two fragmentary sculptures drawn in black chalk in a more careful and precise style: the torso of a Venus and a female draped figure, probably a dancing Maenad, with her right arm broken off. These two studies have been identified as copies after objects in the collection of Vincenzo Borghini, a Benedictine monk who was the prior of the Ospedale degli Innocenti and luogotenente of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence. The dancing figure appears indeed also on a page from a sketchbook by Francesco Morandini containing copies after artifacts in Borghini’s collection (Florence, Uffizi, inv. 4271F; see R. Scorza, ‘Vincenzo Borghini's Collection of Paintings, Drawings and Wax Models. New Evidence from Manuscript Sources’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , LXVI, 2003, p. 108). Morandini depicted the same statuette also in a painted portrait of Borghini now in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe (ibid., fig. 1). Both Morandini and Naldini were protégés of Vincenzo Borghini and had access to his collection, which included prints, paintings, small bronzes, and waxes after antique models. Among other examples of Naldini’s practice of copying antique objects and Renaissance statuettes is a red chalk study after Michelangelo’s Samson Slaying the Philistine at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 80.3.301; J. Bean and L. Turčić, 15th and 16th Century Italian Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1982, no. 138, ill.).
The crowded scene, drawn in pen and ink, on the recto of the sheet is difficult to interpret; it is perhaps a scene of investiture. The graphic style and the vertical format of the composition, with numerous figures gravitating around the center of the scene, are characteristic of Naldini’s work. The verso of the sheet shows two fragmentary sculptures drawn in black chalk in a more careful and precise style: the torso of a Venus and a female draped figure, probably a dancing Maenad, with her right arm broken off. These two studies have been identified as copies after objects in the collection of Vincenzo Borghini, a Benedictine monk who was the prior of the Ospedale degli Innocenti and luogotenente of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence. The dancing figure appears indeed also on a page from a sketchbook by Francesco Morandini containing copies after artifacts in Borghini’s collection (Florence, Uffizi, inv. 4271F; see R. Scorza, ‘Vincenzo Borghini's Collection of Paintings, Drawings and Wax Models. New Evidence from Manuscript Sources’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , LXVI, 2003, p. 108). Morandini depicted the same statuette also in a painted portrait of Borghini now in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe (ibid., fig. 1). Both Morandini and Naldini were protégés of Vincenzo Borghini and had access to his collection, which included prints, paintings, small bronzes, and waxes after antique models. Among other examples of Naldini’s practice of copying antique objects and Renaissance statuettes is a red chalk study after Michelangelo’s Samson Slaying the Philistine at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 80.3.301; J. Bean and L. Turčić, 15th and 16th Century Italian Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1982, no. 138, ill.).