Gherardo Cibo

First and foremost a botanist, Cibo was also an amateur artist and composer. Scion of a noble Genoese family, he studied in Rome and Bologna and travelled on diplomatic and ecclesiastic missions to Germany, before retiring in about 1540 from public life to Rocca Contrada in the Marches (modern Arcevia). There he devoted the rest of his life to botanical and zoological studies and to the drawing of landscapes on exploratory walks through the local country-side. Only recently has he been identified as the artist responsible for a large group of landscape studies, previously thought to have been made by one Messer Ulisse da Cingoli. The Morgan owns several drawings from a dismembered sketchbook sold at auction in 1989, a gouache depicting a coastal scene, and an entire sketchbook with drawings mostly executed in pen and purple ink (see no. 1969.16). In comparison to these more literal renderings of topographical views, this drawing represents a certain poetic vision which in some sense prefigures the art of the seventeenth century and of Claude Lorrain.