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Lot Essay
The painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo was the author of several influential treatises on art practice and it is, indeed, as a writer and a theorist that he is best known today. Between 1565 and 1571 Lomazzo executed his most important and ambitious commission: the decoration of the Foppa Chapel in the church of San Marco in Milan. The monumental project consisted of a fresco decoration with Prophets and Sibyls in the dome (fig. 1), a Paradise in the apse, narrative scenes on the walls, and an altarpiece.
This drawing, showing highly foreshortened standing figures on the recto and the verso, is a preparatory study for the Foppa Chapel decoration and therefore an important addition to the artist’s graphic corpus (Marciari, op. cit., 2012). The figures on the imposing vault were painted di sotto in sú in dramatic poses and steep perspectives. The rendering of these monumental characters, some seen from the front and others from the back, was carefully studied by Lomazzo not only in this drawing, but also in a second similar sheet in the Princeton University Art Museum (inv. x1947-136; Marciari, op. cit., 2014, no. 24, ill.). In these drawings, both double-sided and executed in the same technique, the artist’s main concern was to create a credible foreshortening for the figures rather than define their details. For this reason the figures are delineated with essential lines and reduced to simple geometric forms, in an almost cubist style.
Fig. 1. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Prophets and Sibyls. Foppa Chapel, Church of San Marco, Milan.
This drawing, showing highly foreshortened standing figures on the recto and the verso, is a preparatory study for the Foppa Chapel decoration and therefore an important addition to the artist’s graphic corpus (Marciari, op. cit., 2012). The figures on the imposing vault were painted di sotto in sú in dramatic poses and steep perspectives. The rendering of these monumental characters, some seen from the front and others from the back, was carefully studied by Lomazzo not only in this drawing, but also in a second similar sheet in the Princeton University Art Museum (inv. x1947-136; Marciari, op. cit., 2014, no. 24, ill.). In these drawings, both double-sided and executed in the same technique, the artist’s main concern was to create a credible foreshortening for the figures rather than define their details. For this reason the figures are delineated with essential lines and reduced to simple geometric forms, in an almost cubist style.
Fig. 1. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Prophets and Sibyls. Foppa Chapel, Church of San Marco, Milan.