Lot 11: LEONARDO CORONA

LEONARDO CORONA MURANO 1561 - 1605 VENICE THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION, WITH ADAM AND EVE AND THE SERPENT AND TWO STANDING SAINTS Pen and brown ink and wash over black chalk, heightened with white on blue paper; bears attribution in pen and brown ink, probably in Zaccaria Sagredo's hand: Leonardo Corona 271 by 167 mm

A. Piai, 'Sette Maniere, dodici disegni', Arte Documento, no. 24, 2008, p. 108, reproduced fig. 3; p. 113, note 11

Possibly from the so-called Sagredo-Borghese album,
the provenance of which possibly as follows:
Doge Nicolò Sagredo, Venice, by circa 1654;
his brother, Stefano Sagredo, Venice;
his nephew, Zaccaria Sagredo, Venice;
his wife, Cecilia Sagredo, until sold, circa 1743;
sale, New York, Sotheby's, 13-14 January 1989, lot 108;
sale, Paris, Christie's, 27 March 2003, lot 62

Paintings by Corona are in several Venetian churches, as well as in the Doge's Palace. He works in the manner of Tintoretto, using compositional and figure types characteristic of late 16th century Venetian art.

His drawing style has not been clearly defined and no studies can be connected to autograph paintings. The Tietzes endeavoured to construct a small corpus of his drawings, in part based on old attributions,υ1 but over the years it has not been universally accepted, and more recently Roger Rearick has proposed a smaller and slightly different groupυ2 as has Andrea Piai (see Literature). In view of Zaccaria Sagredo's extensive collection of Venetian drawings and his closeness to their sources (see lot 13, below), his attribution should be taken seriously. Another drawing, Mucius Scaevola before Porsenna, now in the Courtauld Institute, bears the same Sagredo attribution and is generally accepted as autograph on that basis. It does share some similarities with the present study.υ3

1. H. Tietze and E. Tietze-Conrat, The Drawings of the Venetian Painters, New York 1970, vol. l, pp. 162-164; vol. II, pls. CXXXIII and CXXXIV
2. W.R. Rearick, Il disegno veneziano del Cinquecento, Milan 2001, pp. 196-198
3. Tietze, op. cit., p.163, no. 672, pl. CXXXIV; Rearick, op. cit., p. 197, fig. 102; Piai, op. cit., p. 107, fig. 2