Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries
Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries
The Art of Pastel: A Swiss Private Collection
Attributed to Felicità Sartori
Portrait of a man in armor, said to be Count Federico Borromeo
Auction Closed
January 25, 04:44 PM GMT
Estimate
4,000 - 6,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
The Art of Pastel: A Swiss Private Collection
Attributed to Felicità Sartori
Pordenone c. 1714 - 1760 Dresden
Portrait of a man in armor, said to be Count Federico Borromeo
Pen and gray and brown ink with touches of blue and red chalk, brown and gray washes. Pasted on the backing an old label with a pen and brown ink inscription: Conte Federico Boromei Milanese / Opera della celebre Rosalba Carriera / di Venezia.
122 by 101 mm; 4 ⅞ by 4 in.
where acquired by Jacques-Louis Isoz
Bernardina Sani has proposed that this portrait of a young man in armor, said to be Federico Borromeo, is the work of a female pupil of Rosalba Carriera, Felicita Sartori. Sani's attribution is based first of all on the compelling similarity with Felicita's miniature of Johann Adolf Hasse in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.1 She also notes the stylistic similarities with a three-quarter length portrait of William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, executed in pen and ink with wash, which has been given to Rosalba Carriera.2 Another very similar portrait miniature of a young gentlemen, formerly attributed to Rosalba Carriera, on the art market in 2002, can be associated with the style of the aforementioned works by Felicita Sartori.3
Sartori first trained in the house of her uncle, Antonio dall'Agata, a painter and engraver in Gorizia, before moving to Venice around 1728, where she became a pupil of Rosalba, who was at the height of her popularity. Around 1741 Sartori was invited to Dresden by Franz Joseph von Hoffmann, councilor to August III, whom she married the following year. He died in 1749, at which point her movements become unclear and she possibly remarried. She died in Dresden in 1760.
Her surviving works are apparently all miniatures, mostly drawn after well-known prototypes by Rosalba. It is probable that she learned pastel before specializing in miniatures, and the extent of her work in that medium is unclear; very possibly some of the surviving pastel copies after Rosalba are actually by Felicita Sartori. Rosalba seems to have portrayed her pupil in a handsome pastel, Portrait of a lady in a Turkish costume, holding a mask, now in the Uffizi, a replica of which is in the Musée d'Art and d'Histoire, Geneva.4
1. Dresden, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. M.22
2. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 1975.1.385 (as Pietro Antonio Novelli). See Francis Russell, "Drawings by Rosalba", The Burlington Magazine, March 1997 (vol. 139), pp. 196-198, reproduced figs. 61, 62
3. Sale Christie's, London, 28 May 2002, lot 23
4. Sani, op. cit., see respectively, nos. 344-345, pp. 306-307, both reproduced