Lot 38: PELLEGRINO TIBALDI (CIRCLE OF)

(Bolgona 1527-1596 Milan) The Prophet Joel. Pen and brown ink and wash, heightened with white bodycolor on blue laid paper. 290x221 mm; 111/2x8 inches. With a study of a male torso in ink, verso. Head (?) watermark. Paul Joannides considers this an indirect copy after Michelangelo's fresco in the Sistine Chapel. A number of sets of drawn copies after engravings of the Sistine seem to have been produced in Rome in the second half of the 1500s. Though Joannides records 4 series that are copied from the engravings by Adamo Scultori, in pen, wash and white heightening on beige or off-white paper--2 in the Louvre, one at Windsor and another, on a smaller scale, in Haarlem--no companion piece to the current sheet on blue paper is known. He further notes that this drawing was made after the corresponding engraving by Giorgio Ghisi from around 1549 and not after the one by Adamo Scultori. The current drawing is significantly more vigorous than the copies based on Adamo Scultori's engravings. Its technique and handling strongly recall Tibaldi's draftsmanship; it likely comes from his circle and was exectued in the 1550s. Regarding the study on the verso of the current work, Joannides does not exclude the possibility that it was copied after a lost drawing by Michelangelo. He compares it with an outline sketch of a torso seen from the rear on a sheet of studies for the Battle of Cascina in Oxford (Parker 295).