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Liliane Fredericks
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Medium
Pen and brown ink on thick paper
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Signed/Inscribed/Dated
German and French text on verso
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Dimensions
81.00mm wide
112.00mm high
(3.19 inches wide 4.41 inches high)
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Literature:
Further related readings: Birke V., Italian Drawings 1350-1800: Masterworks from the Albertina, Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1992/93); Cazort M., Mauro in America, an Italian Artist visits the New World, Yale University Press (2003).
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Condition:
Good
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Description / Expertise
Previously attributed to Giuseppe Bernardino Bison, the present sheet is undoubtedly by Mauro Gandolfi. It shows the same characteristics in style and technique to numerous drawings of Study of Heads produced by the artist and now located in Vienna as well as in various private collections . Interestingly, on this drawing the artist has exploited the technique of hatched lines to create the shadows criss-cross to form a pattern of rhombuses, or lozenges, as was very much the practice of professional engravers in the eighteenth century. Mauro Gandolfi was not only a prolific draughtsman but also an accomplished engraver by trade only recently emerging from under the shadow of his more famous father Gaetano and uncle Ubaldo. Although Mauro seems to have inherited from his father a delight in filling pages with clusters of picturesque heads drawn mostly from his imagination, the neoclassical mode of this drawing makes for a secure attribution to Mauro.
The draughtsman’s career was much more eventful than that of his father’s. It is while training as an engraver in Arras and Paris in the 1780’s that the artist was exposed to the Revolutionary ideas fomenting in France at the time. After spending six years in Paris whilst undergoing the most rigorous training in the world for reproductive engraving, he returned to Bologna in 1806 fluent in French and full of Napoleonic sympathies. However, he soon became ideologically disillusioned and eventually shifted his focus on skills as a printmaker. Increasingly active as an engraver, he wrote a widely read treatise Trattato dell’incisione in 1816.
On the fame of this publication, the artist was invited to visit America, an event coinciding with legal problems arising from his estranged wife, thus prompting his decision to try his fortunes in the New World that very same year. Even so, Gandolfi’s next artistic activity is recorded in Milan between 1817 and 1822, the artist returning to Bologna for the last ten years of his life where he died in 1834.
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