Prospero Antichi

The drawing originally belonged to a now dismembered sketchbook, the flyleaf of which, preserved in the Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, Paris, is inscribed in an eighteenth-century hand, “A Book of Drawings / By / Michael Angelo / was sold at Rembrandt’s Sale / in Amsterdam / 1658.” An inserted letter presumed to be from John Barnard to George Hibbert that is preserved at the Fondation Custodia suggests the sketchbook may have been acquired by Barnard from Hibbert. In 1935, while in the collection of Coghlan Briscoe in Dublin, the sketchbook was published as the work of Beccafumi by Reinhold von Liphart-Rathshoff.¹ Donato Sanminiatelli eliminated the sketchbook from Beccafumi’s œuvre and assigned the drawings to Marco Pino instead.² Barbara Pike Gordley also rejected the attribution to Beccafumi and believed the sketchbook to be the work of an anonymous member of the master’s workshop.³ Andrea De Marchi suggested that the drawings were produced by a group of artists, including Alessandro Casolani, Cristofano Roncalli and Prospero Antichi, active in Siena in the late sixteenth century.⁴

Originally consisting of 43 leaves, the sketchbook was broken up and dispersed at auction in 1965. Examples are now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Cleveland Museum of Art; Hamburg Kunsthalle; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Fondation Custodia, Paris.⁵ The drawings include pen sketches, finished portraits in red or black chalk, écorchés, studies after Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, unveiled in December 1541, and architectural studies, one of them accompanied by a transcription from the text of Sebastiano Serlio’s Regole di architettura, first published in 1537. A large number of the drawings may be associated with projects executed by Beccafumi, such as the pen study of a seated man, which reproduces the figure of Lucius Junius Brutus from the ceiling of the Sala del Concistoro in Siena.⁶ A few of the drawings relate to qualitatively superior sheets by Beccafumi elsewhere; for instance, a copy after the recto of another drawing in the Morgan’s collection.⁷ Another sheet from the sketchbook, now in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, juxtaposes copies after two drawings by Beccafumi in the Louvre, Paris.⁸ An attribution of the sketchbook drawings to the master himself may be rejected in light of this evidence.

Despite differences in technique, the drawings appear to be by a single master, rather than by a group, as suggested by De Marchi. Clearly, the hand indicates an artist from the Sienese milieu, who had access to the work of Beccafumi, including his drawings. It is difficult to reconcile the drawings with the style of the only known Beccafumi pupil, Marco Pino, who entered the master’s workshop in 1537 and moved to Rome in ca. 1544. Instead, the draftsman was probably working later, in around the second half of the sixteenth century, in Siena. He may well have been a member of the academy lead by Ippolito Agostini, as suggested by De Marchi.

The recto and verso of the present sheet originally constituted pages 59 and 60 of the sketchbook. The verso copies precisely three of the damned in the lower right corner of Beccafumi’s painting Fall of the Rebel Angels in the church of the Carmine, Siena, executed around 1526-30. The sketch of Leda and the Swan on the recto, presumably an original invention by the artist, reoccurs in a second sheet of studies of the ex-Briscoe sketchbook.⁹ No painted composition of Leda and the swan by Beccafumi is known to survive.

Footnotes:

1. Liphart-Rathshoff 1935, 33-70, 161-200.
2. Sanminiatelli 1967, 186, note 2, 189, note 8.
3. Gordley 1988, 328-47.
4. De Marchi, in Siena 1990, 412-25.
5. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. 1966:89, 1966:90; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, inv. PD 7-1965, PD 8-1965; Cleveland Museum of Art, inv. 66.120; Hamburg Kunsthalle, inv. 1966.1; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, inv. 1614-5; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. 1975.1.272; and Fondation Custodia, Paris, inv. 8420, 8421.
6. Liphart-Rathshoff 1935, fig. 2.
7. Morgan Library & Museum, New York, inv. I, 19c; Liphart-Rathshoff 1935, fig. 49.
8. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, inv. 1614-5 verso; Louvre, Paris, inv. 274, 10756. See Siena 1990, 412-13.
9. Liphart-Rathshoff 1935, fig. 51.