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Lot Essay
A painter, draughtsman, and military architect active in Bologna, Mantua, Genoa and England, Girolamo da Treviso made his debut in 1515 as a print designer in Venice, working for the book publisher Bernardino Benali. This experience is evident in the contrasted ink technique of the present drawing, independently recognized as the artist’s by Mario Di Giampaolo and William Rearick in 2002. The elegantly draped lute player, leaning against a ceiling, strongly resembles Raphael’s frescoes at the Farnesina, where similar mythological figures inhabit a spandrel of the loggia of Psyche. Strasser (op. cit.) links the Bonna drawing to its companion featuring Apollo with Cupid playing a viola da braccia recently on the art market (Fig. 1; Galerie de Bayser, 23.5 x 18.7 cm). Similar in size, both works are possibly connected to Girolamo’s lost decoration of the Venetian Palazzo of Andrea Odoni, where the artist frescoed the façade and courtyard between 1531 and 1532. Highly praised by Vasari and other early sources, the sophisticated cycle for Odoni was described later by Carlo Ridolfi, who explicitly mentioned the figures of Apollo, Pallas and other figures painted “in chiaro-scuro” in the area of the “pergolato” – likely the palace’s internal balcony or courtyard (Le maraviglie dell’arte, 1648, VI, p. 153; see further M. Schmitter, ‘Odoni’s Façade: The House as Portrait in Renaissance Venice’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, LXVI, no. 3, 2007, pp. 294-315).
As this cycle no longer exists, a fitting stylistic comparison for the drawing can be found in the ceiling frescoes of the Sala dei Venti at Palazzo Te, Mantua, executed by Girolamo slightly earlier, in 1527, under the supervision of Giulio Romano: like the drawing, the vault features a series of slender figures contained in the ceiling’s coffers. From a technical standpoint, the drawing’s bold execution in brown ink, brush and white bodycolour is comparable to the Sacra Conversazione in the British Museum, a preparatory study for the painting in San Salvador, Venice, painted in 1531 (inv. Pp,2.100; see W.R. Rearick in Dal Pordenone a Palma il Giovane, Pordenone, 2000, no. 30, ill.).
Evidence of the artist’s personal reflexion on the classicizing style of Raphael and Giulio Romano, the Bonna sheet demonstrates Girolamo’s wide-ranging cultural references, from Correggio and Parmigianino to Pordenone.
As this cycle no longer exists, a fitting stylistic comparison for the drawing can be found in the ceiling frescoes of the Sala dei Venti at Palazzo Te, Mantua, executed by Girolamo slightly earlier, in 1527, under the supervision of Giulio Romano: like the drawing, the vault features a series of slender figures contained in the ceiling’s coffers. From a technical standpoint, the drawing’s bold execution in brown ink, brush and white bodycolour is comparable to the Sacra Conversazione in the British Museum, a preparatory study for the painting in San Salvador, Venice, painted in 1531 (inv. Pp,2.100; see W.R. Rearick in Dal Pordenone a Palma il Giovane, Pordenone, 2000, no. 30, ill.).
Evidence of the artist’s personal reflexion on the classicizing style of Raphael and Giulio Romano, the Bonna sheet demonstrates Girolamo’s wide-ranging cultural references, from Correggio and Parmigianino to Pordenone.