Lot 18: GHERARDO CIBO

GENOA 1512 - 1600 ROCCA CONTRADA A LANDSCAPE WITH A RIVER RUNNING THROUGH A FOREST WITH FIGURES, COWS AND A SMALL HOUSE IN THE BACKGROUND Pen and brown ink and wash, heightened with white, on blue paper 261 by 422 mm

Denys Sutton, London, by descent to the present owner

This unusually large and very atmospheric drawing is characteristic in style and media of the work of Cibo. His drawings were previously attributed to a variety of northern artists and then to Messer Ulisse Severino da Cingoli, but Arnold Nesselrath discovered the true identity of the artist, who was from an aristocratic Genoese family.1 He studied in Bologna and Rome, and travelled in Germany and other places north of the Alps, which perhaps accounts for the northern qualities evident in his drawings. He finally settled in Rocca Contrada on the Ligurian coast. Also a botanist and a musician, Cibo could, as Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi wrote '...be considered as the very embodiment of that fascinating Renaissance ideal - the "artist-scientist-dilettante."'2 1. A. Nesselrath, Gherardo Cibo, exhib. cat., San Severino Marche, 1989 2. L. Tongiorgi Tomasi, 'Gherardo Cibo: visions of landscape...', Journal of Garden History, vol. 9, no. 4, 1989, p. 215