Lot 16
  • 16

Hans Johann Rottenhammer the Elder

Estimate
15,000 - 20,000 GBP
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Description

  • Hans Johann Rottenhammer the Elder
  • The Virgin and St. Anne with the Christ Child and St. John the Baptist
  • Pen and brown ink and wash, over black chalk, heightened with white, within black ink framing lines
  • 16.2 x 20.1cm.

Provenance

Wilhelm Koller (L.2632);
probably his sale, Vienna, 5 February 1872;
Heinrich Schwarz (L.1372),
by inheritance until sale, New York, Sotheby's, 12 January 1994, lot 7;
with Jean-Luc Baroni, London

Catalogue Note

Like the two preceding lots, this grand drawing exemplifies one particular aspect of Rottenhammer’s draughtsmanship, and also like them, it is very different from the other two drawings in the group.  Here, the emphasis is largely on sculptural modelling and capturing the fall of light.  The forms are outlined in broad, calligraphic pen strokes, complete with Rottenhammer’s characteristic flourishes in the eyes, the fingers and various other details, yet this typically bravura penwork is here subordinated to the carefully modelled lighting and shading, applied with the brush in white heightening and delicately modulated ink washes.

This emphasis on modelling is notably paralleled in the magnificent drawing of The Raising of Lazarus, at Chatsworth, which was probably executed a little after 1600, and may well have been made specifically as the modello for the fine engraving, in reverse, by Raphael Sadeler.1   Also close in some respects is the drawing of Venus, Mars and Vulcan, in Berlin, which may have been made in connection with two painted versions of the same subject, one dated 1604, the other executed around the same time or slightly later.2  It therefore seems most likely that Rottenhammer drew this depiction of The Virgin and St. Anne with the Christ Child and St. John the Baptist, which cannot be connected with any known painting, in the first years of the 17th century, shortly before he returned from Italy to his native Germany. 

1.  Chatsworth, The Devonshire Collection, inv. 692; Hans Rottenhammer, begehrt - vergessen - neu entdeckt, exhib. cat., Schloss Brake, Weserrenaissance-Museum, and Prague, Nationalgalerie, 2008-9, p. 57, figs. 93-4
2.  Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. KdZ 10477; Hans Rottenhammer.. exh. cat., op. cit., 2008-9, no. 70