Lot 6: PIETRO BUONACCORSI, CALLED PERINO DEL VAGA

PIETRO BUONACCORSI, CALLED PERINO DEL VAGA FLORENCE 1501 - 1547 ROME RECTO : TWO SAINTS AND A GROUP OF FOUR WOMEN; VERSO : A STANDING SAINT AND FOUR OTHER FIGURES Pen and brown ink and wash over black chalk, heightened with white, partly oxidised ( recto ); pen and brown ink and wash, some by a later hand ( verso ); the upper corners cut; bears attribution in pencil, lower centre of recto : P. Ligorio 123 by 199 mm

Sale, London, Christie's, 20 April 1994, lot 1;
with Yvonne Tan Bunzl, London (Master Drawings, 1994, no. 2)

This double-sided study can be compared with two sheets of figure studies, one in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the other in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.υ1 Both have been dated late in Perino's career, to his second period in Rome, which lasted from the winter of 1537 until his death ten years later. The drawings, both executed in the same medium as the present sheet, show similarly monumental standing or walking draped figures, all with the same disproportionately small heads and massive bodies. The Cambridge sheet is also double-sided, with a group of figures on the verso drawn only with the pen, in the same rapid, looping strokes seen in our drawing.

The purpose of the drawings is debated: Elena Parma suggests that the sheets may be preparatory for unknown works, designs for a spettacolo, or simply independent studies, products of the artist's 'fantasia e invenzione'.υ2 Nevertheless, Parma compares the figure type with Perino's caryatids in the base of the walls of the Stanza della Segnatura, executed in 1541.υ3 The standing saints drawn at the edges of both recto and verso of the present sheet are also reminiscent of the Saints Peter and Paul in Perino's slightly earlier Saint Erasmus Polyptych of 1534-6.υ4 A preparatory study for the Saint Peter, formerly in the Jeffrey E. Horvitz collection, was sold in New York, Sotheby's, 23 January 2008, lot 31.

1. E. Parma et al., Perino del Vaga, tra Raffaello e Michelangelo, exhib. cat., Mantua, Palazzo Te, 2001, pp. 298-9, nos. 16-17
2. Ibid.
3. E. Parma Armani, Perino del Vaga, L'anello mancante, Genoa 1986, pp. 192-3
4. E. Parma, op. cit., 2001, pp. 148-150