Francesco Salviati

Like Giulio Romano, Salviati deployed his fecund imagination and wide range of talents not only to create frescoes and paintings but also to develop designs for vessels in precious metals, engraved crystal plaques, tapestries, and armor. He must also have been a reputed and skilled draftsman of emblems such as the one seen in this drawing, as is revealed in a letter of 13 August 1554 from the poet Annibal Caro (1507–1566) to Niccolò Spinelli. Spinelli had approached Caro on behalf of Ersilia Cortese (1529–1587) with the request for a device, and Caro in turn suggested the motif of a lyre or a viola and bow but then referred Spinelli to Salviati for a visual rendition of his idea. In the letter, Caro recommends the artist with the words, “and if the idea pleases you, contact Messer Francesco Salviati, who will make a drawing of it with more grace than anyone else I know, and ask him to do several sketches.”¹ Although the use of personal devices rested on a long tradition, it gained special popularity in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, spawning a string of emblem books. The first of these, published in 1555, was the Dialogo delle imprese militari e amorose by Paolo Giovio (1483–1552), who, like Caro, was a member of the household of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520– 1589), Salviati’s preeminent patron in Rome.

The precise commission for which the present drawing was made remains obscure. As already noted by Jacob Bean and Felice Stampfle in their 1965 exhibition catalogue, however, it is one of two related designs by Salviati for an emblematic device consisting of a moth approaching a flame emanating from a fantastical animal.² Whereas in the Morgan sheet the lamp consists of a double-headed horse and a base in the shape of a human foot, in the second drawing, in the Louvre, it consists of a plumed elephant’s head and a second, grotesque, leonine head with breasts and opened mouth.³ Both lamps stand on a jagged oval formation, possibly representing a bed of flames. Though lacking a motto—the inscription on the banderole of the Morgan version appears purposefully indecipherable—the impresa seems to convey a call to vigilance and prudence: the moth is attracted by the light of the lamp but must be careful so as not to be burned. The image of the insect fatally attracted to the light is a common symbol for the wretched lover who pursues a fiery passion and therein finds torment and death, but it was also understood as a reference to the soul in pursuit of and consumed by divine love.⁴ Salviati may also have had at the back of his mind the device of a salamander breathing and lying amid flames, which Federico Gonzaga (1500–1540), duke of Mantua, adopted in order to signal the bearer’s powers to nourish the good and extinguish the bad (see 1972.18). A pair of drawings in the Uffizi of two men gathering and passing each other stones also seem to have been designs for a device, in this case to be emblazoned on a salver.⁵

Catherine Monbeig Goguel dates the Morgan and the Louvre drawings to the artist’s maturity, soon after 1550; Cheney, on the other hand, considered the Morgan version to be from his very last years.⁶ A postmortem inventory from 1601 of the possessions of the Roman collector Antonio Tronsarelli includes “a drawing in chiaroscuro of two lamps from the hand of Francesco Salviati.”⁷ If this is a reference to the Morgan or Louvre drawings, one wonders if they might once have formed part of a single sheet. Little is known about Tronsarelli, a contemporary of Salviati, but his library of eighty volumes certainly attests to his erudition. He amassed more than 350 drawings in the last three or four decades of the sixteenth century; forty-six of these were by Salviati, constituting the largest group by a single artist in the collection.

—REP

Footnotes:

1. “E se questa le piace fate che mandi per mes- ser Francesco Salviati, il quale la metterà in disegno con più grazia che altri ch’io conosca, facendogliene fare più schizzi”; Caro 1957–61, 2:173–74. First cited in relation to Salviati by Cheney 1963, 2:532.
2. New York 1965–66, no. 103. According to a note on the old mount and Philip Pouncey’s personal notes, the Morgan drawing was once thought to be by Federico Zuccaro and was attributed by Pouncey to Salviati in 1958. The old inscription records an even earlier attribution to Giulio Romano.
3. Previously classified as anonymous and then by Giulio Romano, the Louvre drawing was reattributed to Salviati by Jacob Bean; see Mortari 1992, no. 509; Rome and Paris 1998, no. 69. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 12085.
4. Compare Erasmus, Adages, no. 851, Pyraustae interitus, who, quoting Zenobius, refers to the insect that flies into the lamp and so burns itself.
5. Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. 1139s and 1140s. See Mortari 1992, nos. 227 and 228.
6. Monbeig Goguel 1972, under no. 149; Cheney 1963, 2:532.
7. “Un disegno de chiaro scuro de doi lucerne de mano de F.co Salviati.” Lafranconi 1998, 542n34, pointing out the possible connection to the Morgan and Louvre drawings.