Niccolò dell'Abbate (1506-1571)

Details

Niccolò dell'Abbate (1506-1571)

Design for a Ceiling: a Youth playing a Lute with three Ladies

black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown wash heightened with white (partly oxidized), on two sheets of paper, silhouetted
350 x 470mm.

Literature

E. Langmuir, Two Unpublished Drawings by Nicolò dell' Abate, Burlington Magazine, CXVII, 1975, p. 729, figs. 57-8
E. Langmuir, Arma Virumque ...Nicolò dell' Abate's Aeneid Gabinetto for Scandiano, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 39, 1976, pp. 151-70

Exhibited

Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum and Washington D.C., The National Gallery of Art, Master Drawings from the Woodner Collection, 1983-4, no. 16, illustrated

Lot Essay

This and the following lot are fragments of the cartoon for Niccolò's octagonal oculus fresco of a concert, painted for the Rocca of Scandiano, detached in 1772 and now in the Galleria Estense, Modena. Painted for the Boiardo family probably around 1540, the walls of the room whose ceiling was decorated with the Concert were frescoed with episodes from the Aeneid, and commemorated the poetic achievements of the family's illustrious forebear, Matteo Maria Boiardo (1434-94), author of the epic poem Orlando Innamorato.

Further cartoon fragments are at Windsor, A.E. Popham and J. Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle, London, 1949, nos. 46-8, fig. 17

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