January 2025
Wednesday, January 1
Trois Crayons (French, "three crayons") The technique of drawing with black, white and red chalks (à trois crayons) on a paper of middle tone, for example mid-blue or buff. It was particularly popular in early and mid-18th century France with artists such as Antoine Watteau and François Boucher. (Clarke, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms)
Coming Up
Greetings from a chilly London and a Happy New Year to all readers.
In this month’s newsletter, Drs Astrid Reuter and Stefania Girometti introduce the Italian Baroque drawings at the Städel Museum, while Dr Rachel Hapoienu chooses a ‘Drawing of the Month’ from the Courtauld. Nigel Ip reviews ‘Drawing the Italian Renaissance’ at the King’s Gallery, and the customary selection of current events, literary and audio highlights, is followed, as ever, by the ‘Real or Fake’ section.
Special thanks to Christie’s and to all who attended our collaborative event with Christie’s at the start of December.
For next month’s edition, please direct any recommendations, news stories, feedback or event listings to tom@troiscrayons.art.
NEWS
In art world news
In Paris, the Notre-Dame Cathedral has reopened to the public following a five-year restoration campaign. In Paris, a lost drawing of Arthur Rimbaud by his lover Paul Verlaine sold for €585,000 at the auctioneers Tessier & Sarrou. In Washington, the National Gallery of Art has announced the appointment of Andaleeb Badiee Banta as Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings. In Dublin and Edinburgh, the National Gallery of Ireland and National Galleries of Scotland are hosting their annual January displays of watercolours by J.M.W. Turner from the bequests of Henry Vaughan. This year however, to mark the 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth, the two institutions are hosting special exchange exhibitions displaying works from the other’s bequest.
In exhibition, auction and art fair news
In London, London Art Week has announced its closure after over ten successful years supporting London and its international community of art dealers. In New York, The Winter Show takes place at the Park Avenue Armory from January 24 – February 2. In Brussels, BRAFA, runs at the Brussels Expo from January 26 – February 2. In New York, Master Drawings New York begins with a preview day on January 31 before opening to the public from February 1 – February 8. A rich programme of events, discussions and panels has been organised by The Drawing Foundation in association with Master Drawings New York 2025. Event details are now available, and registration opens on January 9. Trois Crayons has co-organised an event which features four early career curators based in European and US collections who will discuss their recent or upcoming exhibitions that focus on old master drawings.
Concerning the February auctions, Sotheby’s has published online the catalogue of their February 5 sale, Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries, while Christie’s has uploaded a selection of highlights from their February 4 auction, Old Master & British Drawings. In London, Sir John Soane’s Museum is hosting an online exhibition which explores the contribution of artists to architectural practice in Renaissance Italy by focusing on the North Italian Album, a volume of drawings in Soane’s collection. In Rome, Antonacci Lapiccirella is hosting an exhibition of 43 views of Rome executed by an English artist around 1830 which remains open until January 31.
Celia Paul (b. 1959), Portrait of Kate (The Artist’s Sister) Reading, 1986, 55 x 75 cm, British Museum, London, inv. 2024,7055.1 © The Trustees of the British Museum
In lecture and event news
The Getty Museum has posted to their Youtube channel two recordings of the online symposium, ‘Drawn to Blue: An Online Symposium’, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam. In Munich, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte will host a colloquium, ‘Michelangelo 550!’, on January 15. Attendance is free and lectures can also be streamed via Zoom. The exhibition ‘Michelangelo 550! Bilder des ‚Göttlichen‘ in der Druckgraphik’ opens the following day.
In literary and academic news
The journal Master Drawings has published its latest issue, Vol. 62, no. 4, celebrating French drawings, with articles on Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Hubert Robert, Jean Robert Ango, Alois Ko and Étienne Yang, and an obituary of Alastair Laing. A new open access peer review journal, L‘IDEA, has published its first volume, which consists of two issues, one of which is dedicated to drawings. The journal will publish one two-issue volume per year. The second edition, devoted to the work of Federico Zuccari, will be published on December 20, 2025. The Burlington Magazine has instituted a new annual 'Prize for Research on Southern Netherlandish Art 1400-1800' in partnership with the University of Cambridge worth £1,000. Deadline for applications is September 1, 2025. The new prize supplements the pre-existing ‘The Burlington Magazine scholarship for the study of French 18th-century fine and decorative art’. Applications for this prize close March 30, 2025.
In acquisition news
The Meadows Museum, Dallas, has acquired a drawing by Luis Paret y Alcázar from Galerie Terrades, in line with the museum’s recent form for adding Hispanic works on paper to the collection. KBR - Royal Library of Belgium in Brussel, Brussels, has acquired a sketchbook by Fernand Khnopff, and a drawing by Bonaventura I Peeters, the latter of which was acquired from Galerie Lowet de Wotrenge. The British Museum, London, has acquired a drawing by Celia Paul by from John Swarbrooke Fine Art which exhibited at our summer exhibition, 500 Years of Drawing. The Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Weimar, has acquired a drawing by Franz Innocenz Kobell from Nonesuch Gallery, and the Chateau de Versailles has pre-empted a drawing by Jean-Henri Riesener from the auctioneers Daguerre Enchères.
EVENTS
John Robert Cozens, View of Vietri and Raito, Italy, c. 1783, watercolor over graphite on cream laid paper, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Stuart Collection, museum purchase funded by Francita Stuart Koelsch Ulmer in honor of Dena M. Woodall. On display at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, from January 16.
This month we have picked out a selection of new and previously unhighlighted events from the UK and from further afield. For a more complete overview of ongoing exhibitions and talks, please visit our Events page.
UK
Wordlwide
Demystifying drawings
The Italian Baroque Drawings of the Städel Museum
With Drs Astrid Reuter and Stefania Girometti
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.
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 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 organized 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.
Iif 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
DRAWING OF THE MONTH
Dr Rachel Hapoienu, Assistant Curator of Works on Paper at the Courtauld Gallery, London, has kindly chosen our sixteenth drawing of the month.
Allan Ramsay (1713-1784)
Studies of arms and drapery, c. 1740-46
Black and white chalk on blue paper, The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)
Study sheets like these are inherently more interesting to me than highly polished drawings, as they reveal the working process and a glimpse into the mind of their creator. The artist of this sheet, Allan Ramsay, was a Scotsman who moved to London in 1732/33 and found enormous success, becoming Principal Painter to King George III. There are over 600 paintings listed in Alastair Smart’s catalogue raisonné of the artist, so Ramsay clearly needed a large repertoire of poses and costumes to draw upon to meet this demand. Nevertheless, he stands out among his contemporaries for his devotion to drawing. The hands at left on this sheet were used in Ramsay’s portrait of Mrs Jane Madan, signed and dated 1746, formerly in a private collection and sold at auction in 2020. The basket in the drawing was replaced with long feathers in the painting. The torso at right may have been used in a number of female portraits, perhaps most likely that of Mrs Elizabeth Symonds, now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Many of Ramsay's drawings, like this sheet, focus on hands and the position of the fingers, reminding us that, even for the most talented artists, hands are eminently challenging to depict. This sheet also aptly demonstrates why an artist would choose to use blue paper: it served as the ideal mid-tone to study the relationship between light and dark. The white chalk is used to brilliant effect here, exploring the reflection of light on bare skin and on luxurious fabrics that likely would have been costly and shiny. This use of white media would be much less successful on white paper, and so Ramsay elected to use black and white chalk studies on blue paper more than 100 times in preparatory studies for his paintings.
Compared to other blue paper drawings in our collection, this sheet is noticeably darker in hue. Blue paper is typically ‘variegated’ – formed of coloured fibres derived from broken-down rags. There are not only blue fibres in the mix, but white, brown, beige or red, producing a shade of blue that varies between each vat of paper pulp. When I put this drawing under our microscope, I was surprised to see very little variety in the paper fibres inherent in this sheet, which is instead formed of a high proportion of blue fibres mixed with purely white fibres. This explains its deeper blue tone compared to typical blue paper. Many of Ramsay’s blue paper drawings are similarly dark, and so he must have deliberately chosen a particular paper stock to more effectively complement his use of white highlights. This is a potent reminder that for draughtsmen, paper is not just a neutral background, but integral to their working process.
This drawing is currently on display at the Courtauld Gallery until 26 January 2025 in Drawn to Blue: artists’ use of blue paper.
REVIEW
Attributed to Titian, An ostrich, c.1550 © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust
Drawing the Italian Renaissance (1 Nov 2024 - 9 Mar 2025)
The King’s Gallery, London
Reviewed by Nigel Ip (Print Quarterly)
Sat quietly in the first room of the King's Gallery is a young man hunched down in a chair, sketching on a sheet of paper. We do not know his name nor where he came from. This may sound like a description of one of the many copyists encouraged to sketch in the Drawing the Italian Renaissance exhibition, but it is, in fact, the first object in the show. The drawing’s cryptic attribution to an unidentified Florentine artist hints at the exhibition’s underlying narrative: the role of connoisseurship.
Featuring 156 sheets from the Royal Collection, this is the first large-scale survey of Italian draughtsmanship in Britain since the 2010 exhibition Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings at the British Museum. While the latter focused on the period 1400-1510, the King’s Gallery show offers a kind of sequel with its major coverage of the 16th century. As a result, hidden under the guise of this thematically arranged highlights presentation is an attributional framework of stylistic differences from the various schools of Italian painting. One example is how a Tuscan painter like Fra Bartolomeo depicted generic trees with thin trunks, unlike Venetian painters from the circle of Domenico Campagnola whose trees possess far more detail and individualised features.
Roughly 10% of the exhibited drawings - 15 to be exact - are labelled as ‘circle of’, ‘copy after’, or by unidentified artists of a particular region. As a map at the entrance illustrates, a large concentration of the drawings come from Northern and Central Italy, yet some also originate from parts of Sicily and Sardinia. As there is no geographic or meritocratic hierarchy in the way things are displayed, these unknowns are given equal prominence to the Raphaels and Michelangelos in the show. There are, however, a few honourable mentions.
A black-and-white chalk study on blue paper of an ostrich, squared for transfer, has been attributed to Titian due to its paper type and subject matter suggesting a Venetian origin. It is one of 12 drawings being exhibited in the UK for the first time. Related to this are the mentions of whether drawings were made from real-life observations or purely from the artist's imagination, as was the case for Jacopo Bertoia’s drawing of six horses. Next to it is a stunning pen-and-ink drawing of a dromedary, considered to be an early copy of a lost drawing by Gentile Bellini.
Equally exciting is Fra Angelico’s head study of a cleric done in metalpoint, an extraordinarily rare survival of the Florentine artist’s draughtsmanship. Another great survival is a recently conserved cartoon by Bernardino Campi which once transferred a design of the Virgin and Child for an altarpiece in the church of San Biagio, Codogno. Adding to the list of exceptionally large drawings is a detailed design of a candelabrum, attributed to Marco Marchetti. Its asymmetrical design hints at its capacity to provide the patron or bronze-founder with a range of motifs to choose from.
Organised into broad categories - life drawing, portraits, landscapes and nature, applied arts, drawings of the divine, studies for interiors, and drawings as works of art - the curation is about as stripped back as it gets. Groupings tend to be relatively familiar, and when objects are not being thematically linked by subject matter, they are connected by the artist’s regional networks and stylistic influences. When Michelangelo isn’t next to Leonardo da Vinci, he is paired with Sebastiano del Piombo. Similarly, Perino del Vaga and Raphael’s studies for Roman frescoes transition elegantly into a trio of Parmese drawings by Parmigianino, Correggio, and Michelangelo Anselmi. This is also where the placement of unknowns affords a chance to critically reassess the attributions being put forward.
Federico Barocci, The head of a young woman, c.1582 © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust
Situated between Leonardo’s bust-length drawing of a wild man and a fabulous trio of colourful Federico Barocci head studies is the head of an old woman by an unidentified Milanese artist. While its facial type attests to Leonardo’s influence, the use of coloured chalks on blue paper indicates a later date closer to Barocci’s time. Another visually intriguing drawing depicts the Adoration of the Shepherds, attributed to the little-known Neapolitan artist Leonardo Castellani, with its unusual combination of unrelated narratives and use of blue bodycolour in odd parts of the composition.
Probably the most unique drawing in the exhibition is one depicting Ierardina Dallumote giving thanks to the blessed Camilla by an unidentified Marchigan artist. Upon first impression, its medieval appearance is far removed from the pioneering naturalism seen in every figurative drawing presented in the show. Yet, it is, in fact, believed to have been made around the turn of the 16th century somewhere south of Raphael’s birthplace. A final drawing worthy of close attention is Leonardo’s drapery study for the angel in the Virgin of the Rocks which contains the master’s inky fingerprint.
Leonardo da Vinci, The drapery of a kneeling figure (DETAIL OF LEONARDO’S FINGERPRINT), c.1491-4 © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust
Bridging the last two rooms, a selection of four drawings and a Wenceslaus Hollar etching offer insights into the Royal Collection’s acquisitions of Italian Renaissance drawings. Numbering almost 2,000 sheets, the majority probably entered the collection during Charles II’s reign (1660–85). Visitors learn about the collectors’ marks of Nicholas Lanier (a star) and Peter Lely (the initials ‘PL’), annotations and prices by the dealer William Gibson, and the habit of some collectors to cut off the corners of sheets for decorative purposes.
This is an exhibition aimed at introducing new audiences to the centrality of drawing in the Italian Renaissance, through its various functions, techniques, and wide-ranging stylistic appearances. Accompanying some of the works are cases containing samples of their respective mediums, such as chalks, iron gall ink, and various types of paper; these didactic displays are something the Royal Collection consistently does very well in their drawings exhibitions. However, even seasoned specialists can find new areas of growth due to the presence of lesser-known artists and uncertain attributions. If one were to suggest a game, one would cover all the labels and ask the experts to identify their makers. The range of answers would surely be fascinating, perhaps even groundbreaking.
Drawing the Italian Renaissance remains open at the King’s Gallery until March 9.
Real or Fake
Can we fool you? The term “fake” may be slightly sensationalist when it comes to old drawings. Copying originals and prints has long formed a key part of an artist’s education and with the passing of time the distinction between the two can be innocently mistaken.
This month’s case concerns an artist whose work has already once graced this section of the newsletter. The victim of the forgery, Luca Cambiaso, a Genoese artist of the 16th century, was widely copied in his own lifetime and original compositions can often been found in secondary versions produced by workshop assistants and followers. Indeed, this drawing is known in at least three versions, two of which are deemed to be autograph. One of these drawings is certainly by Cambiaso; the other was produced by a ‘follower’ operating some 400 years later, but which is which?
Scroll to the end to reveal the answer.
Resources and Recommendations
to listen
William Blake’s Eccentric Arts
‘For Blake, visionary art is not mysterious or fuzzy or soft. Visionary art is something which actually very precise and crisp.’ In this episode, British art historian Martin Myrone, Convenor of the British Art Network at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and former senior curator of Pre-1800 British art at Tate Britain, discusses Blake’s work and reputation during and after his lifetime. Myrone wrote the introduction to Lives of William Blake, a book of early accounts of Blake’s life from Getty Publications.
TO watch
200 Years of the National Gallery
In celebration of the National Gallery’s 200-year anniversary, a three-part documentary series has been released tracing its origins in a private house in Pall Mall to its current home in Trafalgar Square. Narrated by National Gallery staff, past and present, the series guides the viewer through change, war, and the embrace of modernity. See here for episodes 2 and 3.
to read
Sanguine: a History of Red Chalk Drawings
Kirsten Tambling traces the history of drawing in red chalk, or ‘sanguine’ as it came to be known (after the Latin word for 'blood'), from Renaissance Italy to Belle Époque Paris. And of course, a history of red chalk would not be complete without some discussion of the ‘trois crayons’ technique, from which this organisation takes its name.
answer
The original, of course, is the upper image.
Lower image: Luca Cambiaso (1527–1585), The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine of Alexandria, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin OH
Cambiaso’s manner of simplifying the human form through a series of planes and blocks rendered his drawings ripe for imitation, but also susceptible to fraudulence. Here, Eric Hebborn, discussed in November 2023, directly copies from one of Cambiaso’s original compositions. Somewhat ironically, Hebborn’s version is a copied from a drawing at the Galleria Estense in Modena (inv. 688), which is now believed to be a workshop replica and not an original. Cambiaso’s original drawing, reproduced here, is at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin OH, while another autograph version is at the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa (inv. 4628).
In a posthumous publication, The Art Forger’s Handbook, Hebborn describes exactly how he made and aged his ‘Cambiaso’ drawing:
‘Although this drawing was not made on old paper, the ageing given to it has been particularly successful, and the sheet speaks of a long and arduous life. The drawing has been treated to a dramatic and exclusive process reserved only for successful work on modern paper - a kettle of boiling water has been poured over it.’
‘If you have been over-energetic in your stressing of an edge, you may have caused quite long tears, and these should be neatly mended. The repair will suggest to the viewer that some former owner held the drawing in sufficient esteem to take the trouble to mend it. The operation is very simple. One merely has to unite the torn edges and paste a narrow strip of fine Japanese rice-paper to hold them together at the back. I used this method when drawing The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine of Alexandria after Luca Cambiaso (1527-85).’
For further reading, see E. Hebborn, The Art Forger's Handbook, London, Overlook Press, 1997, p. 54, pl. 22.
Workshop of Luca Cambiaso (1527–1585), The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine of Alexandria, Galleria Estense, Modena, inv. 688.
