Andrea Boscoli

Nathaniel Hone (1718-1784), London (L.2793);

William Armistead (1753-1831), Liverpool,

thence by inhertitance to Gordon Davies, Esq., London,

his sale and others, London, Christie's, 6 July 1982, lot 11,

where acquired by Ralph Holland (1917-2012), Newcastle upon Tyne and London,

his sale, London, Sotheby's, 5 July 2013, lot 246,

where acquired by the present owner

This captivating study for a cartouche, most likely a design for a frontispiece, is a rarity within the corpus of drawings by this much-admired Florentine draftsman. The drawing itself bears a traditional attribution to Boscoli and with the dense chiaroscuro and abundant and bravura use of wash, is entirely characteristic of this artist's original and distinctive graphic style. Indeed, the handling of the present work is highly comparable to the drawings Boscoli made illustrating scenes from Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, dated by Julian Brooks, on stylistic grounds, to “the period at the end of Boscoli’s sojourn in the Marches and his last years in Rome before his death there in 1608”.¹ Both in the drawings from this series and in ours, Boscoli has simplified the geometric forms of his figures and architecture, and has been characteristically attentive to the treatment of light and shade, contrasting deep pools of dark wash with the white reserves of the paper.

In addition to their aforementioned stylistic similarities the Gerusalemme Liberata drawings are of a broadly similar size and scale to our drawing and exist in both vertical and horizontal formats. Julian Brooks has previously speculated that the present design may have been intended as a frontispiece for the Tasso illustrations, though without further evidence, this remains fascinating conjecture.

A pupil of Santi di Tito (1536-1603), Andrea Boscoli was admitted to the Accademia del Disegno in Florence in 1584. His ornamental and architectural drawings are few in number, though Baldinucci mentions Boscoli’s collaboration in his youth with Bernardo Buontalenti (1531-1608) and Santi di Tito in the preparation of ephemeral decorations, a small but highly visible industry within the Granducal court. Our drawing bears witness to Boscoli's debt to Buontalenti's inventive imagination and refinement in the execution of sculptural details, and it can be compared with some of the few architectural studies by the artist which have survived, for instance a design for a wall decoration in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford.²

¹J. Brooks, “Andrea Boscoli’s ‘Loves of Gerusalemme Liberata’,” Master Drawings, vol. 38, no. 4 (2000), p. 449

²Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, inv. no. WA1944.102.46