CF STUDIES JOURNAL 09 - Flipbook - Page 41
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Copying drawings in the Renaissance: animal studies, an altarpiece by Orazio Gentileschi and a drawing by Raphael
Copying drawings in the Renaissance: animal studies, an altarpiece by Orazio Gentileschi and a drawing by Raphael
The Oxford Male Nude is one of a small group of life
drawings that have been convincingly associated with
a projected but never executed Resurrection altarpiece
by Raphael for the chapel of Agostino Chigi in Santa
Maria della Pace in Rome.19 As it happens, we are
unusually well informed about the peregrinations of
this particular sheet during the Cinquecento, which
are the subject of an important forthcoming paper by
Claudia La Malfa.20 In it, she will expand upon Tom
Henry’s observation that the drawing was not only a
source of inspiration for Raffaellino del Colle in two
paintings, again on the theme of the Resurrection, but
must also have been given to him by Giulio Romano.21
It subsequently passed to Cherubino Alberti, who
copied it – in reverse – in red chalk in a drawing now in
the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome (fig. 8).22
It must also have been during the time when it was in his
possession that it was copied – yet again in reverse and
this time in pen and brown ink (fig. 9) – by Bartolomeo
Passerotti, who was in Rome in 1551, and is next
documented in his native Bologna in 1560.23 The
drawing was presumably still with Cherubino, who
did not die until 1615, when Orazio adapted it for
his altarpiece. By the second half of the seventeenth
century, if not before, it had reached England and
belonged to Sir Peter Lely, who died in 1680, and
whose collector’s mark the sheet bears in its bottom
right corner.24 It is therefore not impossible – although
absolutely not proven – that it may have accompanied
Orazio to these shores when he came to work for
King Charles I in September/October 1626.25
Fig. 8 / Cherubino Alberti
after Raphael, Male Nude,
ca. 1550-1560, red chalk
on paper, Rome, Istituto
Nazionale per la Grafica.
Fig. 9 / Bartolomeo Passerotti
after Raphael, A Male Nude,
seen from behind, pen and
brown ink on laid paper, 31.6 x
20 cm, Private Collection.
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