Alessandro Turchi, l'Orbetto (Verona 1578-1649 Rome)
Alessandro Turchi, l'Orbetto (Verona 1578-1649 Rome)

The Massacre of the Innocents

Details
Alessandro Turchi, l'Orbetto (Verona 1578-1649 Rome)
The Massacre of the Innocents
with inscription 'Alessandro Veronese'
black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown wash
8 1/8 x 11 5/8 in. (206 x 295 mm.)
Provenance
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 26 November 1974, lot 12.
Literature
G. Marini, Alessandro Turchi detto l'Orbetto, 1578-1649, exhib. cat., Verona, Museo di Castelvecchio, 1999, p. 202, under no. 63.
Exhibited
J. Stock, Disegni Veneti degli collezioni inglesi, exhib. cat., Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 1980, no. 50.

Lot Essay

Preparatory for Turchi's painting of the same subject in a private collection, Munich (fig. 1; exhib. cat., Verona, 1999, op. cit., ill. p. 94). Passages of the drawings are nearly identical to the Munich painting, especially the configuration of figures in the foreground. In the background, the buildings differ slightly between painting and drawing, and the latter omits the group of putti in the upper right quadrant.
Turchi depicted this subject in at least two other paintings, one now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and the other in the collection of Corsham Court, Wiltshire (op. cit., nos. 12 and 26). There is also a drawing at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg that corresponds closest to the Corsham Court painting (op. cit., no. 63) and another one in the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid (E. Schleier, 'Drawings by Alessandro Turchi', Master Drawings, 1971, IX, no. 2, p. 150, no. 17 and pl. 26a).

More from Old Master and 19th Century Drawings

View All
View All