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Lot Essay
The drawing was created as part of the Museo Cartaceo, a museum in paper conceived by the scholar Cassiano dal Pozzo as a collection of drawings after antiquities and after natural specimens. In the 1760s, after long negotiations, the collection, which by then was in the possession of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, was acquired for King George III and entered his library in Buckingham Palace. At that time the drawings were reorganized and rebound by Richard Dalton, who also kept some of the drawings for himself. The drawings in Dalton’s own collection were later dispersed at auction upon his death (for a summary of the provenance of this sheet see the introductory note in the sale catalogue Phillips, London, 12 December 1990, lot 236).
The present drawing is still mounted on a 17th Century mount, characterized by the double framing line, which is commonly found in drawings from the Museo Cartaceo (A. Claridge, ‘The Chronology and Organization of the Collections: Mounts, Annotations and Numberung’, in Claridge and Dodero, op. cit., part 3, I, pp. 127-130).
Pietro Testa is one of the better documented artists working for Cassiano dal Pozzo. Contemporary sources document how as a young man Testa was living in Rome in poverty, malnourished and in rags, copying the antiquities of the Palatine, the Colosseum and the Campidoglio. The artist’s fortune changed when in 1629 he was admitted in the Roman studio of the German painter Joachim von Sandrart and later to that of Pietro da Cortona. After being expelled from the latter for insubordination, Testa was admitted to the circle of Cassiano dal Pozzo and began to draw antiquities for him.
The fragment depicted is a terracotta plaque known only from this drawing, the actual artifact is untraced. In Roman times such terracotta reliefs were used for decoration and became very popular as collector’s items during the 16th Century.
The present drawing is still mounted on a 17th Century mount, characterized by the double framing line, which is commonly found in drawings from the Museo Cartaceo (A. Claridge, ‘The Chronology and Organization of the Collections: Mounts, Annotations and Numberung’, in Claridge and Dodero, op. cit., part 3, I, pp. 127-130).
Pietro Testa is one of the better documented artists working for Cassiano dal Pozzo. Contemporary sources document how as a young man Testa was living in Rome in poverty, malnourished and in rags, copying the antiquities of the Palatine, the Colosseum and the Campidoglio. The artist’s fortune changed when in 1629 he was admitted in the Roman studio of the German painter Joachim von Sandrart and later to that of Pietro da Cortona. After being expelled from the latter for insubordination, Testa was admitted to the circle of Cassiano dal Pozzo and began to draw antiquities for him.
The fragment depicted is a terracotta plaque known only from this drawing, the actual artifact is untraced. In Roman times such terracotta reliefs were used for decoration and became very popular as collector’s items during the 16th Century.