Pen and brown ink, heightened with white lead bodycolour, on off-white laid paper. Laid down. Inscribed with Richardson’s shelfmarks Lk.72. / BB 59 / Lk.70. / J(?)H. in brown ink on the backing sheet.
260 x 165 mm. (10 ¼ x 6 ½ in.)
Sold to a Private Collection.
PROVENANCE: Jonathan Richardson, Senior, London (Lugt 2184), with his shelfmarks (Lugt 2983 and 2984) and on his mount; Probably his sale, London, Christopher Cock, 22 January to 8 February 1747; Probably acquired at the Richardson sale by Henry Howard, 4th Earl of Carlisle; By descent in the Howard family at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, until 2001; Their sale (‘The Property of the Trustees of the Will of Lord Howard of Henderskelfe Deceased, Removed from Castle Howard’), London, Sotheby’s, 11 July 2001, lot 81.
LITERATURE: Paul Joannides, ‘Salviati e Michelangelo’, in Catherine Monbeig Goguel, ed., Francesco Salviati o la Bella Maniera, exhibition catalogue, Rome and Paris, 1998, pp.54-55, note 4; Julien Stock, ‘Rediscoveries: Michelangelo’, FMR International, June-July 2000, pp.20-24; Catherine Bindman, ‘The Lady is a Michelangelo’, Art on Paper, January-February 2001, pp.22-23; Camilla Baskcomb, Peter Bower and Julien Stock, ‘Michelangelo’s Mourning Woman: The rediscovery and investigation of a forgotten drawing’, The Paper Conservator: The Journal of the Institute of Paper Conservation, Vol.25, 2001, pp.151-165; Stephen Ongpin, Michelangelo: A Masterpiece Rediscovered /Un Capolavoro ritrovato, exhibition catalogue, Florence, Palazzo Corsini, 2001; ‘Examining Western Papers: A Conversation with Peter Bower’, in John Slavin, Linda Sutherland, John O’Neill, Margaret Haupt and Janet Cowan, ed., Looking at Paper: Evidence and Interpretation – Symposium Proceedings, Toronto 1999, Ottawa, 2001, pp.205-210 and pp.237-242; Alessandro Bagnoli, Il piacere del colorire: Percorso artistico di Alessandro Casolani (1552/53-1607), exhibition catalogue, Casole d’Elsa and Radicondoli, 2002, p.38; Paul Joannides, Raphael and His Age: Drawings from the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, exhibition catalogue, Cleveland and Lille, 2002-2003, p.62, under no.7; Nicholas Turner, ‘Breve storia del collezionismo di Old Master Drawings in Inghilterra e negli Stati Uniti’, in Anna Forlani Temesti and Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, ed., Disegno e disegni: Per un rilevamento delle collezioni dei disegni italiani, Florence, 2003, p.140, p.142, fig.3; Paul Joannides, Musée du Louvre: Département des arts graphiques. Inventaire général des dessins italiens VI: Michel-Ange, élèves et copistes, Paris, 2003, p.246, under no.99; Paul Joannides, ‘Personifying the good and evil of all humanity’, in Paul Joannides and Dominique Cordellier, Louvre - Drawing Gallery: Michelangelo, Paris, 2003, p.8; Paul Joannides, ‘Salviati and Michelangelo’, in Francis Ames-Lewis and Paul Joannides, ed., Reactions to the Master: Michelangelo’s Effect on Art and Artists in the Sixteenth Century, Aldershot and Burlington, 2003, p.79; Louis-Antoine Prat, ‘Trente ans et des poussières: une vue cavalière du marché du dessin’, Revue de l’Art, 2004, No.1, p.95, fig.8; James Hall, Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body, London, 2005, pp.24-25, pl.3; Jeffrey Archer, False Impression, London, 2005, p.52.
This splendid, recently discovered study by Michelangelo is an important and highly significant addition to the corpus of drawings by the great master of the High Renaissance. Discovered by Julien Stock pasted into an album of otherwise nondescript drawings in the Library at Castle Howard in Yorkshire, the present sheet is also remarkable for being one of the earliest surviving drawings by the artist.
Michelangelo was an indefatigable draughtsman, yet it would appear that only a fraction of his drawn oeuvre has survived to this day. The extant corpus of drawings by the artist numbers slightly more than 600 individual sheets, many of which are double-sided. While he occasionally presented finished sheets as gifts to particular friends and also sometimes produced drawings for his students and other artists to work from, Michelangelo appears to have refused to part with most of his drawings, keeping them in his studio. Nevertheless, he is known to have periodically destroyed bundles of his own drawings, particularly late in his life. As Vasari relates: ‘I know that a little before he died he burned a great number of designs, sketches, and cartoons made with his own hand, to the end that no one might see the labours endured by him and his methods of trying his genius, and that he might not appear less than perfect.’1
It would seem that many of the sheets thus destroyed by the artist were early works, as only a handful of drawings from the first thirty years of his career are known. There are, for example, no surviving preparatory studies for any of his earliest sculptures, such as the Battle of the Centaurs and the Madonna of the Steps in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, the three small statues for San Domenico in Bologna, the Bacchus now in the Bargello in Florence or the Pietà for St. Peter’s in Rome. The absence of preparatory drawings for Michelangelo’s own youthful works lends a greater significance to the handful of surviving studies by the master which can be dated to his early career, of which the present sheet is a new and outstanding example.
In style, technique and conception, the Mourning Woman may be added to a small but distinctive group of figure studies in pen which Michelangelo produced very early in his career, between about 1490 and 1505. Just four other early drawings of this type have survived; in the collections of the Louvre, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, the Albertina in Vienna and the British Museum. Drawn on sheets of similar size to the present example, these four drawings are likewise characterized by dense crosshatching in pen and brown ink and a sense of monumental form, with one or two figures drawn on a large and imposing scale, so as to fill the sheet. Each of these drawings is, in fact, quite sculptural in effect, and it has often been noted that their hatched penwork bears some relation to Michelangelo’s technique as a sculptor, and in particular his use of a toothed or claw chisel to model the marble surface of his sculptures. The use of the pen is itself characteristic of the artist’s youthful draughtsmanship. As Bernard Berenson noted, ‘Michelangelo’s favourite instrument, in his earlier years, at all events, would seem to have been the pen…With it he could evoke upon the lifeless sheet before him the delicate gradations and subtle planes necessary to the rendering of the human form as he conceived it.’2
As they are unconnected with his other works, the precise dating of these early pen drawings by Michelangelo has remained somewhat problematic, particularly as the artist’s pen manner remained fairly consistent from the beginning of his career through to the 1520’s. It has been noted, however, that thebold penwork and elaborate crosshatching of this group of drawings shows the influence of the draughtsmanship of Michelangelo’s master Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448/8-1494), whose studio he entered in April 1487 when he was twelve years old. This would seem to confirm the accepted notion that these drawings are among the artist’s earliest works. Yet already in these precocious studies Michelangelo’s application of dense, crosshatched lines of brown ink endow his figures with a greater sense of volume and more varied surface effects than can be found in Ghirlandaio’s own drawings.
It would seem that Ghirlandaio was well aware of his young pupil’s talents. Vasari notes how the master was greatly impressed by the drawings of his apprentice: ‘When the ability as well as the person of Michelagnolo had grown in such a manner, that Domenico, seeing him execute some works beyond the scope of a boy, was astonished, since it seemed to him that he not only surpassed the other disciples, of whom he had a great number, but very often equalled the things done by himself as master, it happened that one of the young men who were learning under Domenico copied with the pen some draped figures of women from works by Ghirlandajo; whereupon Michelagnolo took that drawing and with a thicker pen outlined one of those women with new lineaments, in the manner that it should be in order to be perfect. And it is a marvellous thing to see the difference between the two manners, and the judgement and excellence of a mere lad who was so spirited and bold, that he had the courage to correct the work of his master.’3
In later years Michelangelo was somewhat disparaging of his apprenticeship with Ghirlandaio, claiming to his assistant and biographer Ascanio Condivi that the elder artist had taught him nothing. Condivi writes that ‘I am told that Domenico’s son attributes the excellence and divinitàof Michelangelo to a great extent to his father’s teaching, whereas he gave him no help whatever, although Michelangelo does not complain of this; indeed, he praises Domenico both for his art and for his manners.’4 Despite Condivi’s comments, however, the profound influence of Ghirlandaio’s pen drawings on Michelangelo’s draughtsmanship cannot be ignored. The technique of crosshatching in pen was, for example, widely used by Ghirlandaio in his own drawings, and almost exclusively for single-figure studies5. This was especially true of the drawings of the late 1480’s, when Michelangelo was working in his studio. The practice of crosshatching remained popular in the Ghirlandaio workshop through the end of the 15th century, and it would have been natural for the young Michelangelo to have adopted the technique. As Berenson has observed, ‘the pen-work in [Michelangelo’s] early drawings, and indeed more than one trick of shorthand of later date, tell truthfully that Ghirlandajo was the man who first put a pen into Michelangelo’s hand and taught him how to use it.’6
As noted above, the present sheet may be compared with four pen drawings by Michelangelo from the beginning of his career, all of which are clearly inspired by the 13th and 14th century Florentine painting which the artist studied closely as a youth.Indeed, two of the drawings are derived from figures in frescoes by Giotto and Masaccio. The first of these, a study of Two Figures in the Louvre7, is generally regarded as Michelangelo’s earliest surviving drawing. Dated by Michael Hirst to around 1490, when the artist was just 15 or 16 years old, the Louvre drawing is copied from two figures in Giotto’s fresco of the Ascension of St. John the Evangelist in the Cappella Peruzzi in Santa Croce, the parish church of the Buonarroti family in Florence. The second drawing from this group is a study of St. Peter in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich8, copied from the figure of the saint in Masaccio’s fresco of The Tribute Money in the Brancacci chapel in the Florentine church of Santa Maria del Carmine.
These two drawings are not, however, exact copies of their respective prototypes by Giotto and Masaccio, but show the young Michelangelo making slight changes to the modelling and drapery of the figures which serve to emphasize their solid, sculptural qualities. As Charles de Tolnay has written, ‘In his predecessors the folds of the drapery had always been subordinated to the composition of the group as a whole; taken singly, the figures and the details appear stiff and organic. Michelangelo succeeded in expressing with heretofore unknown intensity the effect of thick, pliable stuffs, the sense of controlling weight in them, and of the supporting force of the body, and thereby endowed his figures with a new assurance and monumentality. The relationship between body and drapery as cause and effect, barely indicated by Giotto and Masaccio, becomes the focal point of Michelangelo’s studies.’9
The same may be said of the third of this group of early drawings; a double-sided sheet in the Albertina10, depicting a group of standing draped men on the recto and a kneeling figure on the verso. Both sides of the drawing are thought to be, like the Munich drawing, copies after the work of Masaccio; in this case the now-lost fresco of La Sagra, also in Santa Maria del Carmine but destroyed in a fire in 1771. (Vasari remarks on the young Michelangelo’s particular interest in Masaccio’s Carmine frescoes: ‘He drew for many months from the pictures of Masaccio in the Carmine, where he copied those works with so much judgement, that the craftsmen and all other men were astonished, in such sort that envy grew against him together with his fame.’11) The Albertina drawing displays a more assured pen style and a greater sense of depth than either the Louvre or Munich drawings, and must date from slightly later in Michelangelo’s career, though most likely before his departure for Rome in 1496.
The final drawing in this group, the so-called Greek Philosopher in the British Museum12, is the most technically advanced of the four, and has been dated to the late 1490’s or very early 1500’s. The drawing cannot be connected to any known painting or fresco of the Quattrocento, although the figure’s hat and costume are typical of those used by 15th century artists to represent ‘Oriental’ figures of philosophers or sages. Yet while the drawing may copy a now-lost work of the Early Renaissance, it has also been suggested that the figure is Michelangelo’s own invention, ‘in the spirit of his early studies from the old masters’13. Drawn with a richness of detail in two different shades of brown ink, the British Museum Philosopher might almost be regarded as a presentation drawing, were it not for the fact that the verso of the sheet used for another study several years later.
These four drawings - in Paris, Munich, Vienna and London - have long served as touchstones for any scholarly study of Michelangelo’s youthful draughtsmanship, and to these may now be added the present sheet. These drawings also provide an indispensable insight into the young artist’s development beyond the training of his master Ghirlandaio. As Paul Joannides has noted, ‘Michelangelo’s copies are not sketchy but very fully worked, employing a crosshatching that, while learned from Ghirlandaio, far surpasses his in volumetric density and subtlety of surface effect. Indeed, these drawings are more richly elaborated than any known copies by Michelangelo’s contemporaries. As well as familiarizing him with the forms and ideas of great Florentine forerunners, to whose work he returned repeatedly throughout his life, they must also have been conceived as demonstration pieces and, perhaps, as gifts: not one has a Casa Buonarroti provenance.’14
In his magisterial survey The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Bernard Berenson further noted of these early figure drawings by Michelangelo that ‘More than fifty years later, catching at Vasari’s a glimpse of some such sketch of his own as these we have just described, Michelangelo asserted that he had been a better draughtsman as a boy than at any subsequent period. One almost agrees with him. These first studies of his have a grandeur, a repose, and an impressiveness that we scarcely shall find him surpassing. He renders the form with perfect precision under draperies which enhance as well as interpret it; and thus avoids what tended to be a defect in his later drawings of the nude, an over-insistence upon anatomical detail. All done with the pen, these earliest sketches are hatched with a delicate mesh of cross-lines which I almost could fancy to be a veil, believing that, if I drew it away, I should find not the blank sheet, but the nude itself. Curiously like his chisel-strokes are these pen-strokes.’15
Like the Philosopher in the British Museum, no earlier prototype for the present sheet has been identified. Indeed, both Michael Hirst and Paul Joannides have suggested that the Mourning Woman may in fact be Michelangelo’s own invention, and that the drawing should be dated slightly later in the artist’s career than the early copies mentioned above. Joannides further notes that a stylistic comparison may be made between the Mourning Woman and a double-sided sheet of studies of the Virgin and Child by Michelangelo in the Louvre, which has been dated to c.1503-150516.
A marginally later dating of c.1500-1505 for the present sheet is also suggested by the application of white lead bodycolour (biacca) in the arm of the figure, used both to add highlights and to correct some of the artist’s earlier pen strokes17. This is a technique not found in any of the four early drawings in Paris, Munich, Vienna or London. Slight touches of white heightening do, however, occur in the first drawing by Michelangelo that can be related to one of his own works; a study of a Kneeling Woman, also in the Louvre18. The Louvre sheet is a study for one of the three Maries in the unfinished painting of the Entombment in the National Gallery in London, probably executed in Rome around 1500. A more confident application of white heightening, closer in effect to that of the present sheet, is found in a slightly later pen study in the British Museum19 for one of the bathers in the cartoon for the never-executed fresco of the Battle of Cascina, datable to late 1504 or early 1505. Combining elements of both his early copies and preparatory studies datable to the first years of the 16th century, the Mourning Woman may be seen, therefore, to represent an important, transitional link between Michelangelo’s youthful study of the paintings of his illustrious predecessors and his subsequent, more independent and personal works.
If, as has been suggested, the present sheet was not copied from a Trecento or Quattrocento prototype, the question is raised as to what substantial composition Michelangelo might have been working towards when he made this drawing. The figure appears to be dressed in a peplum, a full-length robe worn by women of antiquity as depicted in Renaissance painting. The pose and attitude of the woman is one that would typically have been found in a composition of the Deposition from the Cross or a Lamentation, yet no such project is known to have been undertaken by Michelangelo at this relatively early stage of his career20. Nevertheless, Paul Joannides has suggested that Michelangelo may have made several large–scale figure studies of this type, now lost, which were either for compositions of his own invention or for other artists to work from. What may be a copy of such a figure drawing by Michelangelo is found in a large pen and ink study of a similarly draped and hooded figure seen in profile, particularly close in pose and effect to the Mourning Woman, in the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth21. Traditionally, if unconvincingly, attributed to Girolamo Muziano (1532-1592), the Chatsworth drawing has been proposed by Joannides as a record of a lost early Michelangelo drawing of the same scale and type as the present sheet, of which it may be regarded as a variant.
That the Mourning Woman may have been intended for a religious composition of a Lamentation or Deposition type is further implied by the appearance of a very similar figure, in reverse, in a scene of the Crucifixion from the illuminated manuscript known as the Farnese Hours, in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York22. Begun in 1537 and completed in 1546, the manuscript was executed by the miniaturist Giulio Clovio (1498-1578) for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and soon became one of the most famous illustrated books of the 16th century. The resemblance between the present sheet and the figure in the Farnese Hours folio of the Crucifixion is so close, in fact, that it appears that Clovio may well have copied Michelangelo’s drawing when preparing his composition. Clovio made copies of several drawings by Michelangelo, and often used motifs from the master’s paintings, sculptures and drawings in his own work. Another adaptation of the Mourning Woman, also in reverse, occurs in an anonymous drawing of the Crucifixion in the Accademia in Venice23, a weak variant of the Clovio composition which may derive from a lost design by Michelangelo. A similar drawing of the Crucifixion in the Albertina24, attributed to Lorenzo Sabatini (c.1530-1576), would appear to derive from the same source.
A more straightforward 16th century copy of the Mourning Woman is found in a drawing in the Louvre25, executed in red chalk and convincingly attributed by Paul Joannides to the Florentine artist Francesco Salviati (1510-1563). Although of slightly smaller dimensions, it is a fairly exact copy of the present sheet. The Louvre drawing, which entered the museum from the collection of Charles-Paul Bourgevin Vialart de Saint-Morys (1743-1795), bears an old attribution to Michelangelo in a late 17th or 18th century hand, establishing that the master’s authorship of the design was recognized for a long time after his death26. Like Clovio, with whom he worked closely in the 1540’s, Salviati made a number of drawn copies after works by Michelangelo27.
Another 16th century copy of the present sheet is found in a red chalk drawing by Alessandro Casolani (1552/3-1607) in the Uffizi28.
The vast majority of the drawings by Michelangelo that have survived to this day remained in the possession of his descendants in Florence until the early years of the 19th century, when they were sold or dispersed by various members of the Buonarroti family. As such, apart from the group of drawings by Michelangelo in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, only a very few drawings by the artist can be traced to 18th century English collections. The present sheet is one of these. For reasons that remain unclear, however, the Mourning Woman seems to have lost its proper attribution to Michelangelo by the end of the 18th century.
The earliest known owner of this drawing was the English portrait painter, author and connoisseur Jonathan Richardson, Senior (1667-1745), whose collector’s mark is found at the lower right corner of the sheet. Richardson owned a remarkable collection of nearly 5,000 drawings, mostly Italian works of the 16th and 17th centuries, which included several sheets by Michelangelo. It is, however, difficult to know exactly how many drawings by the artist he possessed, as no inventory exists and the 1747 auction catalogue of the collection only rarely lists the drawings individually. (A recent rough estimate of the number of Michelangelo drawings in the Richardson collection has put forward an approximate figure of some 50 to 60 sheets.29) Richardson’s extensive collection was organized by school and date, and the drawings were further classified with a complex system of shelfmarks, typified by those found on the back of the mount of the present sheet. It was also presumably when the drawing was mounted for Richardson that it was laid down onto a secondary lining of blue paper, which has imparted a distinct bluish-grey tinge to the sheet.
Richardson published several writings on art and connoisseurship, in which the two artists he praised most highly were Raphael and Michelangelo. (Of the latter, Richardson wrote in the first edition of his Essay on the Theory of Painting, published in 1715, that ‘there is not a more remarkable Example of the Force of this Sublime than that of Michelangelo, who having had it in Drawing, and Greatness, has been, and ever will be consider’d as a Prodigy of Art.’30) His best-known work was An Account of some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, written in collaboration with his son and fellow collector Jonathan Richardson, Junior, and published in 1722. For the book, the younger Richardson travelled to Italy and sent back letters describing various sights and collections, which his father then edited for publication. Frequent references are made to Richardson’s own collection of drawings, as for example in his son’s description of Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, which he found wanting in comparison with the artist’s drawings belonging to his father: ‘The Contours, and Airs of the Heads are not equal in any degree to what one sees in his Drawings. The Air of the Charon which my Father has in Black Chalk…is vastly finer than what is to be found here. The like may be said of some few other Drawings for part of both these works which my Father also has: As he has several others of this Master, where in general is greater Beauty than in any Paintings of him that ever I saw. In his Drawings, ‘tis certain Mich. Angelois seen to greater Advantage as a Painter than in the Capella Sistina, or any where else.’31
Jonathan Richardson Senior’s collection of drawings and prints was sold at auction in London in 1747. While the present sheet cannot be individually identified in the auction catalogue, it may have been among the numerous undescribed drawings by Michelangelo that were dispersed over the 18 days of the sale. The drawing was almost certainly acquired at this time by Henry Howard, 4th Earl of Carlisle (1694-1758), who is probably the ‘Howard’ recorded as a buyer at the Richardson sale. Renowned as a connoisseur during his lifetime, the 4th Earl assembled the collection of antique sculpture now at Castle Howard, as well as Italian paintings, cameos, gems and drawings. Yet the attribution of the drawing to Michelangelo is likely to have been lost by the time of its entry into the collections of the Earls of Carlisle, or soon afterwards, as it does not figure independently in any of the Castle Howard household inventories.
In fact, the present sheet remained completely unknown until its recent rediscovery in an album in the Library at Castle Howard. The album in which it was placed was, apart from the present sheet, made up of mediocre drawings, and in its binding appears to date from the last quarter of the 19th century. At this time Castle Howard was the residence of George James Howard, the 9th Earl of Carlisle (1843-1911), a successful painter who, family tradition has it, enjoyed assembling albums and scrapbooks of miscellaneous prints and drawings. It is quite likely, therefore, that the present sheet found its way into an album as part of the 9th Earl’s hobby, although the drawing had by this time almost certainly lost its proper attribution. It should be noted, however, that the drawing appears to have been framed for some time at Castle Howard during the 19th century, before it was placed into an album. This is evident from the reverse of the mount, which shows traces of resin stains from a wooden backboard32.
1. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Florence, 1568; translated Gaston du C. de Vere, London, 1912; 1996 ed., Vol.II, p.736.
2. Bernard Berenson,The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Chicago, 1938, Vol.I, p.185.
3. Vasari, op.cit., p.645.
4. Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, Rome, 1553; translated Alice Sedgwick Wohl, Baton Rouge, 1976, p.10.
5. A typical example is the study of Two Standing Figures in the Uffizi; Jean K. Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan, New Haven and London, 2000, p.137, fig.142.
6. Berenson,op.cit., Vol.I, p.187.
7. Charles de Tolnay, Corpus dei disegni di Michelangelo, Novara, 1975, Vol.I, pp.23-24, no.3 recto, pl.3; Michael Hirst, Michelangelo and his Drawings, New Haven and London, 1988, pl.108.
8. de Tolnay, op.cit., 1975, Vol.I, p.25, no.4 recto, pl.4.
9. Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo: The Youth of Michelangelo, Vol.I, Princeton, 1943, p.65.
10. de Tolnay, op.cit., 1975, Vol.I, p.25-26, no.5 recto and verso, pl.5; Hirst, op.cit., pl.111 (recto).
11. Vasari, op.cit., p.648.
12. de Tolnay, op.cit., 1975, Vol.I, p.26, no.6 recto, pl.6.
13. de Tolnay, op.cit., 1943, p.67.
14. Paul Joannides, Michelangelo and His Influence: Drawings from Windsor Castle, exhibition catalogue, London and elsewhere, 1996-1998, p.14.
15. Berenson,op.cit., Vol.I, p.186.
16. de Tolnay, op.cit., 1975, Vol.I, pp.44-45, no.25 recto and verso, pl.25. Joannides further suggests that the Louvre drawing may have been made with the intention of providing compositional motifs for other artists to use. (Written correspondence, 11 February 2002).
17. This can be seen in the fact that some crosshatched pen lines are drawn over the areas of white bodycolour.
18. de Tolnay, op.cit., 1975, Vol.I, p.47, no.31 recto, pl.31; Hirst, op.cit., pl.116.
19. de Tolnay, ibid., 1975, Vol.I, p.61, no.52 recto, pl.52; Hirst, ibid., pl.123. White heightening also occurs in another Cascina figure study, drawn in black chalk, in the Albertina; de Tolnay, ibid., 1975, Vol.I, p.62, no.53 verso, pl.53 (verso); Hirst, ibid., pl.124.
20. The drawing is unlikely to have been intended for the figure of the Virgin in a scene of the Crucifixion, however, as iconographical tradition dictated that the Virgin be placed at the left of the Cross.
21. Michael Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Italian Drawings: Venetian and North Italian Schools, London, 1994, p.177, no.896 (Chatsworth 227), as Girolamo Muziano ‘in a Michelangelising mood’. The drawing measures 307 x 187 mm.
22. Maria Giononi-Visani and Grgo Gamulin, Giorgio Giulio Clovio: Miniaturist of the Renaissance, London, 1993, illustrated p.58; Webster Smith, ed., The Farnese Hours, New York, n.d., fol.102 (where it is noted that ‘the prominent figure of Mary in the Crucifixion is evidently based on one of Michelangelo’s inventions.’).
23. Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Gallerie dell’ Accademia di Venezia: Disegni romani, toscani e napoletani, Milan, 1989, p.34, no.7 (as ‘copy after Michelangelo?’). The drawing is inscribed ‘DI MANE DI MCEL ANGELUS’. Hugo Chapman kindly pointed out the relationship of this drawing to the present sheet.
24. Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis, Vol.II, Vienna, 1994, p.1057, Inv.2007.
25. Joannides in Goguel, op.cit., p.53, fig.1; Baskcomb, Bower and Stock, op.cit., p.153, fig.4; Joannides, op.cit., Paris, 2003, pp.246-247, no.99.
26. Joannides’ attribution of the Louvre drawing to Salviati has been accepted by Catherine Monbeig Goguel and, more recently, by Alessandro Nova (written correspondence, 23 November 2001).
27. One such example is a faithful copy by Salviati of a lost testa ideale drawing of a woman in profile by Michelangelo, formerly with Colnaghi and now in a French private collection; New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 2000, no.3.
28. Bagnoli, op.cit., p.40, no.66 (not illustrated). The drawing measures 215 x 217 mm.
29. Lene Østermark-Johansen, Sweetness and Strength: The Reception of Michelangelo in Late Victorian England, Aldershot, 1998, p.67.
30. Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting, London, 1715, p.216.
31. Jonathan Richardson, Senior and Jonathan Richardson, Junior, An Account of some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, France, &c, with Remarks, London, 1722, p.272.
32. Baskcomb, Bower and Stock, op.cit., p.153, fig.2.
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