{"id":2175,"date":"2011-11-23T15:04:34","date_gmt":"2011-11-23T19:04:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.vassar.edu\/rosso\/"},"modified":"2012-08-13T14:19:23","modified_gmt":"2012-08-13T18:19:23","slug":"d-27a-b-four-seated-women","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/catalogues\/drawings\/d-27a-b-four-seated-women\/","title":{"rendered":"D.27A, B (COPIES) Four Seated Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

Four Seated Women, Draped and Partially Draped, and Below a Standing Woman with Her Left Arm Raised and with a Nude Child Standing at her Right Side: Study for the Christ In Glory<\/em> in Citt\u00e0 di Castello<\/strong><\/p>\n

1528<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

D.27A (COPY) Four Seated Women<\/p><\/div>\n

D.27A. Study for The Four Seated Women<\/strong><\/p>\n

Paris, Louvre, Inv. 8781.<\/p>\n

Fig.D.27A<\/a><\/p>\n

Pen and ink and wash, heightened with white, on yellow washed paper, 20.3 x 20.4; wm.?<\/p>\n

LITERATURE:<\/p>\n

Carroll, 1961, 450, n. 18, as reflecting a lost drawing by Rosso for his Christ in Glory<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Carroll, 1964 (1976), II, Bk. II, 284-285, n. 4 (under D.26), Bk. III, Fig. 84a, as seeming to reflect a lost drawing by Rosso, the figures of which the copyist has re-composed.<\/p>\n

Franklin, 1994, 200-202, Pl. 158, as an anonymous and rather muddled copy of a lost drawing by Rosso for the Citt\u00e0 di Castello altarpiece, showing the figures compressed together (by the copyist).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

D.27B (COPY) Four Seated Women and the Woman Below<\/p><\/div>\n

D.27B.\u00a0 Study for The Four Seated Women and for the Woman Below Holding Something in Her Raised Left Hand and with Her Lowered Right Hand the Left Hand of a Standing Nude Child<\/strong><\/p>\n

Munich, Hinrich Sieveking Collection, (formerly Hamburg, Thomas Le Claire, dealer), verso<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Fig.D.27B<\/a><\/p>\n

Pen and ink and wash, heightened with white, on yellow prepared paper, 21.7 x 20.1, the lower right corner missing.\u00a0 Inscribed in pencil at the lower right: L26<\/em>, and faintly near the center: JG<\/em>[?]1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

PROVENANCE: Earl of Dalhousie (Lugt 717a, on the recto<\/em>).<\/p>\n

LITERATURE:<\/p>\n

Thomas Le Claire, Kunsthandel, III, Handzeichnunaer alter Meister<\/em>, Hamburg, November-December, 1985, 8-91 Lot 2, with Fig., as by Girolamo da Carpi.<\/p>\n

Franklin, 1994, 200, 201, Pl. 138, 290, n. 75 as a copy, attributed to Biagio Pupini, of a lost drawing or drawings by Rosso for the Christ in Glory<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The drapery and feet at the top of the drawing in Munich are identical to those of the figures in the Louvre drawing.\u00a0 But the handling of the two drawings and the precise description of details shows that they were not copied from each other.\u00a0 Hence they go back to a common source.\u00a0 Franklin saw that the woman with the child in the Munich drawing was done in a different scale, suggesting to him that that drawing may be a combination of two different lost drawings by Rosso for the Citt\u00e0 di Castello altarpiece.\u00a0 But this difference in size is also an aspect of the finished picture, where that same standing woman is noticeably larger than the figures at the top of the composition.\u00a0 Thus it is likely that the drawing in Munich is copied from a single drawing by Rosso of which the Louvre drawing is another partial copy. \u00a0The bare breasts of the standing woman also relate the Munich drawing to the copy of a drawing for the lower half of the picture in Rome (Fig.D.28<\/a>).\u00a0 It should also be noted that two of the female saints in the Louvre drawing, including the figure that is the Virgin in the altarpiece, are nude to below the waist.\u00a0 The old saint, while having drapery over her head, shoulders and back, has bare arms and torso.\u00a0 She, as St. Anne, is fully clothed in the painting.\u00a0 Clearly, the lost drawing was not copied from the altarpiece where the four female saints are divided into two groups at either side of the risen Christ.\u00a0 Furthermore, the left arm and hand of the second woman (the Virgin in the painting) are fully visible in the Louvre drawing while they are not in the painting.\u00a0 The Louvre drawing also shows the right arm of the last woman (St. Mary of Egypt).<\/p>\n

Although the Louvre drawing, attributed to the School of Fontainebleau, is poorly drawn, and the drawing in Munich is only slightly more finely executed, both probably record quite well Rosso\u2019s lost drawing.\u00a0 Here and there the copies may reflect something of the draughtsmanship of Rosso\u2019s drawing which could have graphically resembled the center part of his Design for a Chapel<\/em> of 1528-1529 (Fig.D.37a<\/a>).\u00a0 But this is not at all certain and the lost original could have been executed in another medium or media.\u00a0 It is possible that the original was itself incomplete as seen in the drawing in Munich.<\/p>\n

The Christ in Glory<\/em> in Citt\u00e0 di Castello was commissioned on 1 July 1528.\u00a0 The partial nudity in the drawing is related to that in the copy in Rome (Fig.D.29<\/a>), and to the partial nudity that appears in another copy of a lost drawing in Florence (Fig.D.28<\/a>) for the lower part of the picture.\u00a0 The original of all these drawings would seem to have been made shortly after Rosso received the commission for this picture and shortly after a trip to Florence where he came in contact again with the art of Michelangelo.\u00a0 Because of an accident and illness work on the altarpiece was abandoned either late in the summer or in the early autumn of 1528.\u00a0 The lost drawings would have been done before this moment.\u00a0 It was not until a year or so later that the painting was actually executed with a different composition of the figures.<\/p>\n

This leads one to speculate on just what kind of composition was presented by the lost original copied in the drawings in Munich and Paris.\u00a0 I had thought that the Louvre drawing showed that it was the copyist who moved the four female figures together, where in the painting they are separated, and Franklin thought the same.\u00a0 But the added evidence of the drawing in Munich suggests that this may not have been the case.\u00a0 It is just possible that the original composition was to be three tiered, something in the manner of Raphael\u2019s Transfiguration<\/em>, also with its changes in scale from one level to another.\u00a0 This might have been the intention of the confraternity that commissioned it, which may account for Vasari\u2019s remark that it did not get what it wanted.\u00a0 The early grouping and diversity of the figures – the \u201cpopolo\u201d in the lower part of the composition, as known from the two other copies mentioned above (Fig.D.28<\/a>; Fig.D.29<\/a>) – may also be dependent on Rosso\u2019s recollection of Raphael\u2019s Roman picture.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>1<\/sup> The recto<\/em> of the sheet shows an Allegory of Abundance with a Satyr, a Man (another satyr?) holding the Branch of a Tree, a Snake, and a Putto holding a Bow<\/em>, by the same hand as the verso<\/em> (on which see Thomas Le Claire<\/em>, above, and Fig.Carpi, Abundance<\/a>).\u00a0 Franklin, 1994, 200, as after the antique.\u00a0 The composition suggests Primaticcio at the time of his arrival at Fontainebleau.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Four Seated Women, Draped and Partially Draped, and Below a Standing Woman with Her Left Arm Raised and with a Nude Child Standing at her Right Side: Study for the Christ In Glory in Citt\u00e0 di Castello 1528 D.27A. Study for The Four Seated Women Paris, Louvre, Inv. 8781. Fig.D.27A Pen and ink and wash, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"parent":820,"menu_order":29,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2175","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2175"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6389,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2175\/revisions\/6389"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}