Italian Fifteenth- to Seventeenth-century Drawings

Italian Fifteenth- to Seventeenth-century Drawings
Author: Anna Forlani Tempesti
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Total Pages: 401
Release: 1991
Genre: Drawing
ISBN: 9780870996061

Perhaps more than any other collector of his generation in the United States, Robert Lehman was interested in acquiring early drawings. He made a great effort to add drawings to the collection of paintings, sculpture, ceramics, glass, and other objects that his father, Philip Lehman, had begun assembling. The 116 Italian drawings analyzed and discussed in this volume are among the more than 2,000 works of art from the collection now housed in the Robert Lehman Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Robert Lehman's collection demonstrates the variety of drawings produced in Italy from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, a period when the purposes and techniques of drawings, as well as the aims and abilities of the artist who made them, became increasingly sophisticated. The volume includes an elaborate design for an equestrian monument by Antonio Pollaiuolo, a magnificent study of a bear by Leonardo da Vinci, a cartoon by Luca Signorelli, a study for a vault fresco by Taddeo Zuccaro, and many other drawings that are among the best Italian examples to have survived from that era. Most types of drawings, in a wide variety of techniques, are represented—figure studies, grand compositions, landscapes, cartoons, modelli, and even sculptors' studies. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

Sixteenth-century Italian Drawings

Sixteenth-century Italian Drawings
Author: Edward J. Olszewski
Publisher:
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Paintings, sculpture, and classical antiquities are the most valuable resources of any museum, and are the first objects to be published in each museum's own collection catalogue or online inventory. Collection catalogues, however, have customarily included only a small sample of the riches to be found in Midwestern collections of master drawings. This volume of sixteenth-century drawings has been largely the work of Burton L. Dunbar (University of Missouri-Kansas City), director of the project and a specialist in the arts of northern Europe, and Edward J. Olszewski (Case Western Reserve University), co-editor for the series, a well-known authority on drawings of the Italian Renaissance. This volume covers the sixteenth century, including artists born as a rule between 1480 and 1580, with the exception of Giovanni Baglione (ca. 1573-1644) and the Carracci. This study represents a gathering of drawings from forty institutions between Ohio and Oklahoma based on a census of seventy-five museums and art centers. Jacob Burckhardt's contention that the Renaissance was, in many respects, an age of paganism is readily belied here by the 471 Italian drawings, the great majority of which are religious subjects. Antiquity provided a veneer beneath which sixteenth century artists could cloak their Christianity to make it seem fresh, reminding believers of the origins of their faith, and reviving the purity of Christian doctrine in its early years. It is no surprise, then, to find numerous drawings of antiquities, and mythologies among the many subjects. A corpus this large can be representative in many ways, offering a cross-section of media, subjects, drawing types, and collectors. Of the 471 Italian drawings scattered across Midwestern America, here we reassemble many that were at one time in one or more prominent collections. Every drawing was examined for the following information: Artist, place of birth and death with dates, biography, title of drawing, date of drawing, dimensions in mm (and in inches), media, institutional credit line, accession number, technical condition, inscriptions, collectors' marks, watermark, provenance, exhibitions, bibliography, comments