Lot 257: AURELIO LOMI

PISA 1556 - 1622 RECTO: STUDY OF A YOUNG MAN POSSIBLY HOLDING A TABLET VERSO: STUDY OF A SOLDIER, SEATED ON THE GROUND, SEEN FROM BEHIND, AND A STUDY OF HIS SWORD Black chalk with touches of white chalk, on buff paper; bears number in pen and brown ink: 4008 308 by 181 mm

Edinburgh, The Merchants' Hall, Italian 16th Century Drawings from British Private Collections, 1969, no. 41, reproduced pl. 55 (as Aurelio Lomi); Newcastle, 1974, no. 40; London, 1975, no. 28; Newcastle, 1982, no. 29

L. Turi and M. Newcome, 'Drawings by Aurelio Lomi,' Paragone, 42, no. 29 (499), September 1991, pp. 41-42, reproduced figs. 40, 41

With P. and D. Colnaghi, London, Old Master Drawings, 1949, no. 5 (as Agostino Ciampelli); Dr. and Mrs. Victor Bloch, their sale, London, Sotheby's, 12 November 1964, lot 96 (as Agostino Ciampelli), purchased by Ralph Holland

When Philip Pouncey was able to connect two drawings by this hand to paintings by Lomi, he amended the earlier attribution to Ciampelli which he had proposed for this and other similar works. Since then, a large corpus of attractive drawings by the artist has been established. Lawrence Turi (loc. cit.) recognised the recto as a preparatory study for the youth in the background of Lomi's Resurrection, one of his nine large paintings for the ceiling of S. Silvestro, Pisa, datable between 1609-11.1 Turi suggests the figure on the verso, which does not appear in the final composition, could have been a rejected idea; the sword, however, resembles that of the man in the right foreground. Titi, author of an 18th-century guide to Pisa, wrote of the large and important cycle of paintings in S. Silvestro: 'tutti sono dell'infaticabile e fecondo Aurelio Lomi' which still stands as a good description of this appealing draughtsman.2 1. R.P. Ciardi, M.C. Galassi, P. Carofano, Aurelio Lomi, Pisa 1989, pp. 243-5, no. 58, reproduced p. 244 2. Ibid., p. 243