BALDASSARE FRANCESCHINI CALLED IL VOLTERRANO (1611-1689) - Receive artist alerts » - More items from this artist »

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Point of the brush and brown wash over red chalk.

123.00mm wide    160.00mm high    (4.84 inches wide  6.30 inches high)

Cantacuzena collection, their mark on verso (not in Lugt); John and Alice Steiner.

Further related readings: Gregory M. & Shleier E., La Pittura in Italia: Il Seicento, Milan (1988& 1989); European Master Drawings from Portuguese Collections, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2000).

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The most original and modern artist of the Florentine Seicento, Volterrano, so-called for his city of origin, was also without doubt one of the finest draughtsmen of the time. Not only did both his biographers Filippo Baldinucci and Niccolo Gabburri own several of his drawings, but these were also popular with collectors . Indeed, he was the only artist who understood the innovations of Pietro da Cortona’s baroque painting. His first teachers were Matteo Rosselli and Giovanni da San Giovanni; however, it is the experience of the illusionistic fresco work painted by Cortona in the Palazzo Pitti that had the most impact on the artist.

This vibrant, robust and uninhibited drawing is indeed characteristic in style and technique to the graphic work of Volterrano’s later style. A stylistically comparable sheet in red chalk by the artist, the ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ (c1664-1670), is in the Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles , and shows a closely related figure of ‘a saint in adoration’. The free brushstroke defining the outlines of the figure together with the dynamic point of the brush applied over the red chalk emphasise the tonal effects rendered by the hatching in red chalk. The style of this study thus becomes illusionistic, concise and baroque.

Volterrano was also influenced by Correggio whose work he came to know directly from his trips to Parma, Bologna and Venice, financed by the Grand Duke. This earned him the nickname “the Florentine Correggio”, the artist also becoming notable in the illusionistic fresco decoration of domes and the ceilings of palaces. The Medici gave him numerous commissions, the most significant of these being the frescoes for Lorenzo de’ Medici for the courtyard of the Villa della Petraia, and the frescoes commissioned by Vittoria della Rovere for the vaults of the villa at Poggio Imperiale and the Palazzo Pitti. The largest groups of drawings by Volterrano are today in the collections of the Uffizi in Florence and the Albertina in Vienna.