Demystifying Drawings #16
Wednesday, 1 January 2025. Newsletter 16.
The Italian Baroque Drawings of the Städel Museum
Above: Stefano della Bella (1610-1664), Deer hunting, ca. 1654, 155 x 247 mm, Pen and brown ink over graphite, grey wash, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
The Städel Museum in Frankfurt houses an exceptional collection of Italian Baroque drawings. With the support of the Gabriele Busch-Hauck Foundation, the museum has conducted an in-depth examination of 90 of these works over the course of a two-year research campaign. The effort has culminated in the ongoing exhibition, Fantasy and Passion: Drawing from Carracci to Bernini (10 Oct 2024 - 12 Jan 2025), as well as the publication of the accompanying German-language catalogue, Fantasie & Leidenschaft: Zeichnen von Carracci bis Bernini.
Exhibition curator and Head of Prints and Drawings before 1800, Dr Astrid Reuter, and catalogue researcher, Dr Stefania Girometti, join the editor to discuss the outcomes of the research project, as well as the exhibition’s curation, and the drawing they would most like to take home with them.
The holdings of Italian Baroque drawings are a particular strength of the Städel’s collection. How did these drawings come to be part of the collection, and how have the tastes of past collectors influenced your own curatorial decisions leading into the exhibition?
Astrid: Frankfurt’s Italian Baroque drawing collection goes back in great part to the museum’s founder, Johann Friedrich Städel (1728–1816). Already Städel’s contemporaries admired the drawings in his possession for their quantity and quality alike. None other than Goethe, for example, praised the Guercino drawings after a visit to Städel in October 1815. In many cases the provenances of the works purchased by Städel are remarkable. A number of the drawings come from the prominent collection of Pierre-Jean Mariette, an influential connoisseur and collector of eighteenth-century France. And sometimes we can even trace the origins as far back as the seventeenth century. The small-scale drawing The Virgin Mary with four holy women in a landscape by Annibale Carracci from the holdings of Padre Sebastiano Resta, for instance, was already extolled by the renowned artists’ biographer Bellori.
The scholarly evaluation of the selection of Italian Baroque drawings presented in our exhibition is based on broad connoisseurship. Numerous colleagues from Germany and abroad contributed—in notes jotted on the passepartouts or in direct conversation. What is more, an entire team worked on processing the drawings here at the museum with the assistance of two notable external experts: Sonja Brink and Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken. In the context of projects like this one, the museum comes to bear as a vibrant place of visual examination, scholarly dialogue, and research. This opportunity to devote ourselves to a largely unexamined part of the Städel collection represents a major step towards the comprehensive scholarly appraisal of our holdings. We have the decisive support of the Gabriele Busch-Hauck Foundation of Frankfurt to thank for this accomplishment.
You have been actively researching these drawings for the past few years. Could you share any discoveries or unexpected insights that emerged from this research project?
Stefania: among the important insights gained during the two years project, I would like to pick three significant examples. The first one gives an overview of the assessing process during such a cataloguing campaign. We held regular meetings with the project mentors, Sonja Brink and Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken. As we went through the whole collection, we noticed how several hitherto unpublished drawings should be considered as starting point for further research and decided to include them in the final exhibition planning. Some of them had served as modello for frescoes, like Pietro Dandini’s Assumption of the Virgin for the sacristy ceiling of the Florentine church San Frediano in Cestello, or Giuseppe Rolli’s Moses striking the rock for the Carthusian monastery of Calci, near Pisa. Other drawings needed to be studied in order to update their attribution. To this group belong Antonio Grano’s Madonna and Child with St Rosalia and St Bartolomeo Martyr, St Augustine (?), St Monica (?), formerly attributed to Carlo Maratti. For other drawings, such as Cristoforo Roncalli’s Angel holding up a banner, the attribution was confirmed and strengthened throughout the cataloguing process.
A second important point deals with the technical analysis of the drawings with the multispectral camera. The daily exchange with the Head of Paper Conservation, Jutta Keddies, was supported by the results from examination. Among others, transmitted light revealed how a 17th century print was used as a support for Agostino Tassi’s Seaport with a galley, many figures on the shore. It also enabled us to detect a male head portrait on the upper left corner of Annibale Carracci’s Flute-playing cupid and Silenus in an arcadian landscape. Furthermore, Infrared False Colours Photography highlighted where exactly the different inks were used in Agostino Carracci’s Landscape with St Francis and two other figures, thus helping a better understanding of the artistic process.
A third noteworthy discovery occurred while researching as Curatorial Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome (Max-Planck-Institute for Art history). The so-called Corpus Gernsheim, housed in the Hertziana, reunites thousands of pictures of the drawings scattered among the world’s renowned collections. Going through the Gernsheim boxes, I noticed that Cristofano Allori drew two other versions of Study of the head of a youth with visor cap, one now in the Tobey Collection in New York and the other in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin. The latter was formerly attributed to Annibale Carracci and had not been considered until the Frankfurt research project benefitted from the fellowship at the Hertziana. This discovery helped to reassess the link between the three versions.
The exhibition is organised along geographical lines, highlighting the different schools of drawing that predominated during the period. What informed this curatorial decision, and which cities and artists are most prominently represented?
Astrid: seventeenth-century Italian art is distinguished by regional art centres that owed their special characters to factors such as specific art traditions, political circumstances, et cetera. Even as late as the period in question, these aspects continued to play a prominent role despite the lively exchange between the regions. Apart from Venice (which was not included in the present project because it was already the subject of an earlier one) particularly Bologna and Rome figure prominently in the Frankfurt holdings, followed by Florence, while Genoa, the Marches, and Naples are represented by a few select examples each. The collection moreover encompasses highly enlightening workgroups by individual artists such as Annibale and Agostino Carracci, Guercino, Simone Cantarini, and Stefano della Bella, in which the characteristics of individual artistic styles are manifest as they relate to the time of a given work’s making, its function, and so on. And the holdings also provide insights into the inner dynamics of the schools that formed around such artists as Pietro da Cortona and Carlo Maratti in Rome.
Cristofano Allori (1577—1621), Study of the head of a youth with visor cap, ca. 1600, 220 x 167 mm, Red chalk in two shades over traces of charcoal on laid paper prepared in white, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Acquired with funds provided by the Stiftung Gabriele Busch-Hauck
What types of drawing can one expect to discover in the exhibition, and what varied functions did these works serve?
Astrid: our exhibition features a fascinating spectrum of drawing techniques and functions. The works carried out in pen, brush, black chalk, or red chalk encompass rapid sketches, in-depth studies, and highly finished works. Polished compositions are on view side by side with initial ideas or endeavours to capture individual motifs. The works are striking by virtue of their spirited lines, dramatic chiaroscuro, and exceptional expressive force, but also the delicacy and searchingness—the hesitations, restarts, and corrections—in which the creative process is evident. This visibility of the artist’s thinking and working processes is what accounts for the special fascination of these drawings. Drawing is a medium that offers extremely personal insights into the individual artistic approach. With regard to this aspect, I find works like della Bella’s Deer Hunting especially powerful—its tension-charged lines convey the speed of the chase—or Salvator Rosa’s depiction of the healing of a possessed man in which Christ’s strengthening aura spreads across the man’s ecstatically twitching body like a shadow.
With current exhibitions focused on Italian Renaissance drawings in Paris, at the Fondation Custodia, and in London, at the King’s Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts, how do technical approaches broadly evolve between these two periods? What characteristics distinguish the Baroque drawings on view here—largely from the 17th century—from the 15th- and 16th-century works on view in Paris and London?
Stefania: the three exhibitions in London and Paris present masterpieces from the Renaissance and show how heterogeneous drawing techniques were across the Italian Peninsula during the 15th and 16th century. This heterogeneity mainly persists in the following century. Silverpoint is the technique which slowly disappears in the 17th century, whereas chalk, be it red or black, is largely preferred by artists such as the Emilian Guercino and Simone Cantarini, or those active in Rome, like Cristoforo Roncalli, Carlo Maratti, Cavalier d’Arpino and Giovanni Maria Morandi. Ink is also a strong presence in 17th century drawings throughout all regional schools, from the Carracci to Jusepe de Ribera and Salvator Rosa.
In Frankfurt we decided to exhibit as many techniques as possible, in order to raise the awareness among the public about the complexity and variety of the drawing medium. The digital tools in the exhibition have been praised by the visitors, who discover in a simple but effective way how multifaceted the material research on drawings can be.
If you had to choose one drawing from the exhibition to take home with you, what would it be and why?
Stefania: this is both a most interesting and difficult question to answer, especially considering a collection of more than 500 sheets. If I had to choose one for the pleasure of looking at the drawing process taking place right in front of the beholder’s gaze, then I would go for Annibale Carracci’s Study of Venus at Rest. Looking at the Venus means looking over Annibale’s shoulder while he is still developing his own ideas and sketching them on paper. You can notice how delicate and accurate his anatomical studies are and how impressive his light modelling is. And this is still visible today, more than four centuries after Venus’ body was drawn. One must consider how many hands the sheet passed through, how many times it had been touched by Annibale’s pupils while being used as modello for the main figure in the painting now in Musée Condé in Chantilly. It then changed its initial function and became a desired object for collectors, eventually ending up in Frankfurt thanks to Städel’s wealth and his passion for drawings.
Passion is a keyword in this context. Firstly, because of the subject – Venus, as the goddess of love, is intimately linked with passion. Secondly, because looking at Annibale’s Venus and at the different poses sketched on the paper has fuelled the discussion with passionate drawings experts from around the world, arguing who and when drew Venus’ figure(s). The longer I looked at the drawing together with the colleagues who generously exchanged with me, the more we wondered if Annibale drew all the lines on the sheet. Especially considering some differences between so well executed chiaroscuro and other, rather clumsy lines in ink, the questions were more than justified. But we agreed that Annibale was the main author, which is why the printed catalogue bears this attribution.
Everyone working on drawings knows how difficult attributions are. While visiting the exhibition together, Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò rightly pointed out how the Lombard erudite Padre Sebastiano Resta (1635-1714) should be considered while identifying the hand behind the two small ink sketches on the two upper corner of the sheet. I personally see her point and welcome the debate, especially considering this opinion coming from a world-renown drawing expert, who recognised Resta’s practice of retracing figures with ink in the Frankfurt drawing.
This very example outlines the complexity of cataloguing projects and brings us back to the term “passion”. In my opinion, passion is the drive force behind drawing, one of the key features that makes it such a fascinating medium. It is the first expression of the artistic idea, the less mediate medium. Drawings still bear the passion of the artist in their material evidence. At the same time, they stimulate the exchange throughout the centuries, connecting passionate drawing enthusiasts from around the world and securing the future research in such a stimulating field.
Fantasy and Passion: Drawing from Carracci to Bernini remains open at the Städel Museum until January 12.
Annibale Carracci (1560—1609), Study of Venus at Rest, ca. 1602, 278 x 378 mm, Pen and brown ink with brush over black chalk, heightened with white chalk, on blue laid paper, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
