Italian Drawings 1400-1600

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection contains just over 1000 drawings by Italian artists dating from the end of the fourteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth. For the scope of this catalogue, we have included a total of 382 drawings from the early period, which we define as artists who were born before 1575. In addition, we have included two books of drawings: the Koenigs Drawing Book (St 331), which contains 50 pages, some left blank on one side, and the Gozzoli Album (I 562), with 20 drawings pasted in. The 401 sheets in the two Gabburri Albums, mostly with drawings by Fra Bartolommeo, are not included in the present catalogue. Around 280 drawings belong to the later period (artists born after 1575) and are yet to be catalogued. Most of the drawings from the early period, and those from the subsequent one (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), were acquired in 1935 with the collection of Franz Koenigs (1881-1941), initially on loan from this collector and since 1940 on permanent loan from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Foundation.

While Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection of Italian drawings is certainly important on an international level, it is not exceptional, apart from the large number of drawings by Fra Bartolommeo. There are more extensive collections elsewhere, especially in the Uffizi (Florence), the Albertina (Vienna), the British Museum (London), the Royal Collection (Windsor) and the Louvre (Paris). Within the Netherlands, the Rotterdam collection of Italian drawings is in the same league as that of Teylers Museum in Haarlem (1,710 sheets) and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (698 sheets). These three collections complement each other well, such that the ‘Collectie Nederland’ (Dutch public art holdings) as a whole includes a representative collection of Italian drawings of excellent quality.1 For instance, Fra Bartolommeo, Pisanello, Tintoretto and Veronese are well represented among the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen drawings, whereas there are no drawings by these artists in Teylers Museum. The collection there stands out because of the relatively large numbers of drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo, while Rotterdam has only one and three sheets respectively.

The Koenigs Collection

Museum Boymans moved into its new building at the beginning of Mathenesserlaan in 1935. It contained spaces for the storage, consultation and exhibition of drawings and prints. This was probably in anticipation of further donations of prints by the collector J.C. Bierens de Haan (1867-1951) and a substantial loan of some 2,670 drawings by Franz Koenigs. In 1934 the leading London art historian Tancred Borenius (1885-1948) wrote, ‘The collection of Old Master drawings formed by M. Franz Koenigs of Haarlem represents easily the most distinguished performance in this field of collecting realized in recent years.’ This comment was prompted by the publication of a deluxe portfolio of facsimiles of the best Venetian drawings in the Koenigs Collection, about which he added, ‘an anthology in which quality most emphatically makes up for quantity’.7 In 1921 the German merchant banker Koenigs moved from his native city of Cologne to Haarlem, where he settled into a mansion just outside the city centre with his young family. The building had to be extended only five years later in order to accommodate his rapidly growing drawings collection.8 In 1931 he was forced to take out a large bank loan because of the deteriorating economic situation. He transferred his drawings collection in fiduciary ownership, plus some paintings, to the bank as security. This security was formalized in 1935 and the collection was moved to Museum Boymans’s new building in order to make it accessible to academics (via research) and the general public (via exhibitions). Overnight the museum held a virtually comprehensive drawings collection of global stature.

The Koenigs Collection also contains many drawings of lesser quality. Koenigs was not known as a connoisseur himself. He simply did not have the time to become one given the demands of his work. He was therefore very dependent on the expertise of the art trade, which needless to say was linked to commercial interests. Sometimes he purchased composite lots at auction, which contained unwanted chaff along with the wheat. Koenigs furthermore died at a relatively young age, as a result of a disastrous train accident, and consequently he never got round to an essential element of collecting, namely selecting and disposing of lesser works in order to enhance the quality of the collection, and filling gaps with new purchases. Two obvious copies of parts of Tintoretto’s painting The Adoration of the Golden Calf (I 229 and I 547), are striking examples of bad buys. The latter dates from the second half of the seventeenth century and is probably not even Italian. Apparently Koenigs and his advisors were not always able to distinguish between good and bad, despite the availability of so many authentic drawings by Tintoretto in the collection to enable stylistic comparisons.

Although Koenigs had bought drawings and paintings by French Impressionists, including watercolours by Paul Cézanne, since his time as an intern in Paris at the beginning of the century, he did not start seriously collecting old master drawings until he settled in Haarlem in 1921. In 1923 the Berlin art dealer Paul Cassirer (1871-1926), who specialized in the work of Cézanne and Van Gogh and with whom Koenigs had done business for some time, opened a branch on Keizersgracht in Amsterdam. He did that because of the deteriorating conditions on the German art market and also to provide his most important client, whose office was nearby, with the best possible service. From the outset the branch was run by the German art historian Dr Helmuth Lütjens (1893-1987), who around 1928 began to maintain a card system and a typescript inventory of the Koenigs Collection. Between 1923 and 1925 Koenigs formed, and invested in, an alliance with the art dealers Böhler in Lucerne and P. & D. Colnaghi in London. The objective was to purchase drawings and paintings jointly. He had first choice of the acquisitions and shared in the profits. In 1923 Koenigs also bought some drawings from Böhler’s own collection and, through the latter’s mediation, he purchased the two prestigious Gabburri Albums and nine separate drawings by other famous artists, including Correggio, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, from the grand-ducal Von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach collection.13 These albums and separate drawings were previously in the collections of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) and later on of King William II of the Netherlands (1792-1849). At the sale of William II’s collection in 1850 they remained unsold or were purchased by William II’s daughter, Princess Sophie, Grand-Duchess of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach.

Koenigs sometimes bought drawings in large numbers at the same time, taking advantage of the huge volumes put up for sale at auctions in the 1920s. On occasion, entire private collections went under the hammer. He seldom attended these sales in person, and instead had himself represented by art dealers such as Leo Blumenreich (1884-1932), Nicolaas Beets (1878-1963) and J.Q. van Regteren Altena (1899-1980). Through the mediation of Beets, at the beginning of February 1928, he purchased 44 drawings, most of them Italian, including no fewer than 24 sheets by Jacopo Tintoretto, from the heirs of the late art dealer Attilio Simonetti (1843-1925) in Rome.14 He paid the then substantial sum of 54,100 guilders. The year before, Koenigs had purchased thirty drawings from an unknown source and probably in one single transaction. They came from the substantial drawings collection (more than 8,000 drawings in 59 albums and 17 portfolios) of the Venetian collector Zaccaria Sagredo (1653-1729), who had inherited some from his father and grandfather and had purchased the rest en bloc in 1727 from the Bolognese Bonfiglioli family.15 From 1743 onwards this collection, which had already been largely inventoried, was sold in several parts. The drawings were removed from the albums and became widely distributed. The inventory numbers – a classification code in letters with a serial number – were written on the versos of the drawings, which made them identifiable. The sheets acquired by Koenigs are mostly by northern Italian artists, in particular from Venice, primarily Palma Giovane and members of the Bassano and Caliari (Veronese) families.16 There are also other cases where it is not known how or from whom Koenigs made important purchases. For example, in 1926 he acquired 28 drawings by sixteenth-century Venetian artists, including a further 13 by Jacopo Tintoretto, which came from a small album compiled in the 1630s and 1640s by the Milan nobleman Francesco II D’Adda (died 1641).17 Likewise the purchase of the Gozzoli Album, which came from the Biblioteca Trivulziana of the Trivulzio princes in Turin. It is known that this noble family had been disposing of parts of its collection for some time before donating the rest to the city of Milan during the 1930s. This was probably also the source of the illuminated book of hours in the estate of Koenigs’s children that was sold in 2001 to the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague, and possibly also of the early Italian drawing book that was bought for the museum in 2016 from the heirs of another of Koenigs’s daughters (St. 331). Sadly, we do not know the precise details of how Koenigs bought these books containing drawings, but it is clear that he was well-known all over Europe as a wealthy, decisive and insatiable collector, so vendors felt free to contact him directly or through an intermediary.

The disastrous stock market crash of 1929 was Koenigs’s last successful year of collecting. In April, 29 drawings were bought for Koenigs at the Bateson sale in London, representing ten percent of all those put up for auction. That same year he purchased en bloc no fewer than 110 sheets, mostly Italian, from the art dealer Julius W. Böhler’s private collection.18 Before the end of the year he also acquired four Italian drawings from the Paris collector Émile-Maurice Marignane (1879-1956). At the beginning of 1930 Koenigs bought a further six or seven sheets from Frits Lugt (1884-1970) that came from the Moscardo Collection in Verona via the Florence art dealer Luigi Grassi (1858-1937).19 Finally, among his purchases in 1931 were two drawings by Willem Buytewech and one by Rembrandt from the collection of Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1863-1930).20 In that year the financial situation became so precarious for Koenigs that he was obliged to take out a substantial loan, for which he transferred his drawing collection and several dozen paintings as security.21 Needless to say there was no publicity. It goes without saying that no further major art purchases were made, but for the time being the collection remained where it was, with the collector in his home.

After 1931 Koenigs purchased items unobtrusively now and again, such as two drawings by Vittore Carpaccio at the sale of the collection of Henry Oppenheimer (1859-1932) in London in 1936. They became part of what we now call the ‘Second Koenigs Collection’, which consists primarily of drawings that were not among the works transferred in 1931 as security for his loan. Besides drawings, this collection also contained paintings, sculptures and furniture. Later on it was inherited by his wife and thereafter by their children.25 In April 1940 Koenigs expressed his happiness about the fact that his former drawing collection had remained intact by gifting the museum the two aforementioned Carpaccio drawings, which he considered to be an essential supplement to the Venetian school.26

Acquisitions since 1945

Since the Second World War, little has been done to expand the collection of Italian drawings. The collection was already of a very high standard and the museum’s purchasing budget, which was not very generous, was intended for collecting in a range of areas. There have consequently been only limited acquisitions. Since 1940 the inventory numbers of new drawings contain the year acquired (‘MB year/T serial number’), which usually makes it easy to recognize post-war acquisitions.27 In 1958, near the end of his term as curator (1950-1959), Egbert Haverkamp Begemann purchased a landscape drawing by Fra Bartolommeo that came from the Gabburri Landscape Album, which had recently been taken apart in the art trade. Most leading print rooms in the world bought one or more sheets for their collections.28 The Rotterdam acquisition (MB 1958/T 1) was made to supplement the exclusively figurative drawings by this artist in the two Gabburri Albums. That same year the museum acquired two Italian drawings, by Matteo Rosselli and Federico Zuccaro, with the arrival of the collection of D.G. van Beuningen, who died in 1955 (MB 1958/T 34 and T 35). Another eighteen years passed before a drawing by Ventura Salimbeni (MB 1976/T 12) was purchased during the curatorship of A.W.F.M (Bram) Meij (in service from 1967 to 2003). Over a decade later he bought a further two drawings by Cavaliere d’Arpino (MB 1989/T 4) and Bernardo Castello (MB 1990/T 4). In 2011, senior curator Albert Elen (in service from 2002 to 2021), who specialized in early Italian drawings, bought a drawing by Antonio Maria Viani (MB 2011/T 1). This was followed in 2016 by a fifteenth-century Italian drawing book from the Second Koenigs Collection (St. 331) and two years after that by a separate sheet from a Florentine manuscript illustrated with drawings from around 1390 (MB 2018/T 24). Finally it was also possible to purchase a representative drawing by Paolo Farinati (MB 2019/T 45), which filled another gap.

Franz Koenigs, whose collection has formed the core of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s drawings collection since 1935, was an important exponent of collecting, which started to develop as an activity as long ago as the sixteenth century. A number of major drawing collectors preceded Koenigs and most of them literally left their tracks, adding collectors’ marks to their sheets; in some cases others did so on their behalf after the collector had died. The renowned drawings collector Sir Thomas Lawrence, a British court painter famous primarily for his many portraits, is a well-known example. After his death the drawings in his collection were blind stamped on the front lower left with the initials TL (L.2445). This was often done so unobtrusively – with little force applied, sometimes with the more conspicuous mark (in ink) of another collector close by or hidden in the composition – that it has only recently been noticed, as is the case with I 498. Koenigs’s drawings were also stamped with his collector’s mark before they were loaned in 1935 (L.1023a) in order to differentiate them from the drawings already in the museum with which they would be intermingled, and which were classified by school and artist. This was probably done by Koenigs’s wife or Helmuth Lütjens. Koenigs’s mark, his initials FK in a horizontal oval, was consistently placed at lower left on the back of each sheet, stamped in brown ink. The tin of ink and the stamp have survived (fig.).

Unfortunately, some of the collectors’ marks sometimes disappeared later on, for example when an old backing sheet or a mount that bore the stamp was removed for conservation purposes in the museum, as was the case with two drawings by Benozzo Gozzoli (MB 976 and MB 977). Usually fragments like this were kept in an envelope in the new mount, but sadly sometimes not.

Such notes are also regarded as collector’s marks, in this case of Lord John Somers, without them having been stamped (L.2981). Richardson was also a collector, as was his son and namesake (L.2170). He placed his own mark (L.2183 or L.2184) at lower right on all his drawings. These sheets were spread far and wide after the sale of his estate in 1747, but thanks to his marks they remained recognizable as having come from his collection. Richardson also mounted his own drawings on sheets with cadres and kept them loose in albums. He often wrote the (putative) artist’s name on the mount below the drawing (L.2995, L.2996), on the reverse sometimes the subjects too (L.2993, L.2994) and the codes of the location (shelf marks, L.2983, L.2984). Later on, all these annotations were described as separate collectors’ marks by Frits Lugt in his Marques de collections (1921, 1956, and online). Some drawings are still on Richardson’s original mounts, such as I 278, I 337 and I 449, while others have been trimmed by later collectors, for example two of the aforementioned Resta drawings and the recently acquired sheet from an illustrated Florentine manuscript (MB 2018/T 24).

The leading Paris art dealer and collector Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) is another well-known example of a major collector who left his footprint on his drawings. He put a tiny mark on them (L.1852) and mounted the sheets on distinctive deep blue mounts. These mounts are still present in some cases because the drawings were stuck fast to them and removing them is difficult. The collection in Rotterdam includes six drawings, including I 467 and I 468, which had been mounted together, but got separated and are now on the loose halves of a Mariette mount.32 They are all included in the standard work on Mariette’s collection that was recently published by Pierre Rosenberg (2019). Collectors’ marks and old mounts like those used by Somers and Mariette give old master drawings quite literally a cachet, and consequently add cultural and economic value. These days they are never removed, which sadly was all too often the case in the past.

Provided they do not mar the composition, the more collectors’ marks there are the better, preferably placed unobtrusively and ideally on the verso. The early Florentine drawing dating from around 1390 (MB 2018/T 24) is a fine example of a ‘collection’ of collectors’ marks on a single sheet. There are the following collectors’ marks on the (current) verso: Jonathan Richardson Sr (1665-1745, L.2183 lower right below the innermost cadre line); John Barnard (1685-1764, L.1420 lower right on the mount); Benjamin West (1783-1820, L.419 blind stamp lower left on the innermost cadre line); August Grahl (1791-1868, L.1199 lower right on the innermost cadre); an unknown collector (not in Lugt, vague imprint lower left of Grahl’s mark).

In the present collection catalogue the collectors’ marks on a drawing are listed under the heading ‘Mark’ in the object information in brackets after the collector’s names in chronological order. The same names are of course also noted under the heading ‘Provenance’, where the successive owners and sale data of each drawing until its acquisition by the museum, are listed in so far as known.

The Museum’s Marks and Its Most Important Drawing Collectors

All twelve of the museum’s marks are in Lugt Online. Of these, only the earliest one is of interest for this collection catalogue. No marks have been added since 1940.

Marks of the two most important collectors of Italian drawings:

Any technical information relating to the paper and the watermark (or a fragment of it, if present) is included in the individual object information, together with references to watermark manuals and other publications. Any missing information will be added in future and existing descriptions will be amended where necessary. Photographs of the watermarks under transmitted light are occasionally but not consistently included under the ‘Photo & video’ tab immediately below the illustration.

The following characteristics of the paper are given in brackets:

v = waterlines (vergeures, in French) (also called laid lines)

P = chain lines (pontuseaux, in French)

V = vertical (direction of the waterlines)

H = horizontal (direction of the waterlines)

Example: vH, 5P = horizontal water-line pattern, with five chain lines

It is important to know that when an artist bought a sheet of handmade paper, it was typically part of a quire, usually five sheets folded once. The watermark was then always in the middle of one of those halves, sometimes with a smaller countermark at the bottom of the other half. Artists often did not use the whole sheet, but only half or an even smaller piece. In the period in which our drawings were made, paper was not a cheap product, nor was it available everywhere, so people were generally frugal with it. That also explains why both sides of the paper were used in many cases. Later, drawings were often trimmed by collectors, as a result of which the probability of the presence of a watermark (or fragment) in drawings is now less than fifty percent.

Watermarks, particularly if there are only small fragments, do not give a lot to go on for an accurate dating. This is very much the case for common types of watermark. It is important to understand that even if one finds a watermark that looks very much like one in the manuals, there is rarely an identical match. Furthermore, the entries in Briquet and Piccard are manual tracings that are often inaccurate. And even if there is great similarity, the dating of the watermark in the manual, which is based on a dated document in an archive, is not automatically also applicable to the drawing. It is possible that the paper for both the document and the drawing had been kept in stock for years before it was used. The watermark in the manual can then only serve as an approximate dating or as supporting evidence for a dating of the drawing based on style characteristics or a demonstrated or supposed connection between the drawing and a dated painting.

A drawing by Alessandro Maganza (S 18) is an example of a sheet with a watermark of a type that can easily be identified and whose approximate dating (c.1580-90) agrees with that of a comparable watermark in the manuals.

It is a crossbow in a circle with a clover leaf above it (49 x 42 mm, on P6 of 8P, vH, to the right of the centre, upside down), resembling Briquet 763 (Ferrara 1597) and 766 (Ferrara 1583), but without the countermark, and somewhat similar to Piccard Online AT3800 PO 123861 (Rovereto 1625), but without the countermark. The same type of watermark occurs in a drawing by A. Maganza in Teylers Museum.33

This seemingly insignificant thin volume with its plain parchment cover is in fact an extremely rare and precious eighteenth-century album containing a remnant of twenty folios from a hypothetical lost mid-fifteenth-century drawing book, more particularly a model book, well-known among specialists in early Italian art.34 It was acquired by the collector Franz Koenigs (1881-1941) shortly before it was first shown to the public in a blockbuster exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 1930, labelled as by the Florentine early Renaissance artist Benozzo di Lese di Sandro, called Benozzo Gozzoli (c.1420/1421-1497). There it attracted immediate attention and was published in rapid succession by Arthur Popham (1929/30) and Mario Salmi (1930).35

Most, if not all of the drawings are by unknown pupils and assistants from the workshop of Gozzoli. This pupil of Fra Angelico (1387-1455) is famous for his fresco cycle The Procession of the Magi in the Cappella dei Magi, the private chapel in the Palazzo Medici in Florence (1459-60), and fresco cycles in Montefalco (San Francesco, 1450-52),36 San Gimignano (Sant’Agostino, 1463-67) and Pisa (Camposanto, 1469-84). The attribution of the drawings to the school of Gozzoli (workshop and immediate circle), first suggested by Popham (Florentine school 15th century, ‘probably an artist in Gozzoli’s studio’) and endorsed by Salmi, was based on the relations between some drawings and details in the artist’s frescoes, especially a foreshortened reclining figure (folio 10 recto) which is close to a similar figure in The Destruction of Sodom, a fresco in the Camposanto in Pisa (destroyed during WWII). This attribution was generally accepted. However, Popham believed all drawings to be by one hand, whereas Salmi distinguished between five different hands.37 Berenson (1938 and 1961) attributed only three drawings to Gozzoli himself and thought that some drawings were by an Umbrian follower of Gozzoli, suggesting Antoniazzo Romano (c.1430-c.1510).38 This tentative attribution to Antoniazzo was not considered by other scholars.

An original fifteenth-century drawing book had in the course of time worn down as a result of frequent consultation and neglect or abuse. Single folios had become unstuck, had been separated from the rest and taken on a life of their own, ending up in different collections. It is also conceivable that some folios were intentionally removed (cut or carelessly torn out). There are traces of three foliations or paginations (consecutive numbering of the folios) still present on some sheets as witnesses to the former order of the remaining folios in the volume, so changes had already been made at an early date. About three centuries after its creation, the remainder of the drawing book was taken apart and the loose folios were individually mounted into the present album.

As mentioned by Porro (1884), the album consists of twenty individually mounted single sheets (each measuring appr. 229 x 160 mm).47 It has a flyleaf at the front and at the back (of the same dimensions), which are connected as a bifolio in the spine and did not belong to the disintegrated original volume. All except six of the twenty mounted sheets have drawings on both sides, the drawn pages thus totalling thirty-three, not counting the first page of the album, which only has texts on it.

The present first page (following the blank flyleaf), which was originally a recto side of a folio near the centre of the drawing book, judging from the old foliation ‘31’, serves as a sort of title page for the album. On the page are two texts that are actually copied after ancient inscriptions, as part of the drawing book, and not intended as a title. The inscription ‘(JE)SVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM' (Jesus of Nazareth king of the Jews) at the top is preceded by a Hebrew and Greek version. Above the centre of the page is the inscription 'PICTORIBVS ATQUE POETIS SEMPER FVIT ET ERIT EQVA POTESTAS’ (Painters and poets have always had licence to dare anything), a quote from Horace’s (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) famous epistle Ars poetica. The fact that both inscriptions are covered by the mounting strips – the missing letters of only the centre inscription afterwards copied on them – is a clear indication that they belonged to the original drawing book and were not written at the time of the construction of the album. In fact there is a close typological resemblance to the capitalized inscriptions below Gozzoli’s frescoes in the church of San Francesco in Montefalco (1450-52).

The flyleaves and pastedowns did not belong to the original disintegrated volume but were added during the construction of the album and must date to the eighteenth century. In the first flyleaf is a Greek Cross type watermark with letters MG below (71 x 49 mm, upside-down, bottom centre, on the fourth, fifth and sixth of eight chain lines) (fig. 5). It is superficially similar to Briquet 5585 (recorded in Autun, France, 1574), which is half the size, without a circle in the centre and without letters MG, probably of Piemontese origin, which would fit with the Milanese provenance of the album.53 In view of its size and the letters, the watermark is probably eighteenth century.

At some point, probably in the nineteenth century, thin loose leaves of tissue paper were inserted in the twenty openings for conservation purposes, in order to protect drawings from rubbing off on the opposite pages. Thirteen leaves of handmade tissue paper still remain. They are all half folios, judging from the position of the French lily type of watermark which is found bisected along one of the long edges in eleven of them. The French lily appears in two variants, both fragmented in half, positioned on chain lines 4-5 or 5-6 of 9 or 10. Variant A is a French lily (distance of the supporting chain lines 25 mm), which can be composed from two halves, from tissues now between folios 22-23 and 36-37 (fig. 6). Variant B is a French lily (distance of the supporting chain lines 27 mm), but only the upper half, inserted between folios 10-11 (fig. 7). This type of watermark (with several subtypes) was very common during several centuries and many examples are found in Briquet, most of which date back to the fifteenth century, which is too early for tissue papers. Ours are probably late eighteenth/early nineteenth century.

The drawings on several pages of the Gozzoli Album are further discussed in the individual catalogue entries.

The Drawings by the Second Draughtsman

The first draughtsman used only 28 out of 96 parchment pages – approximately one third of the available space. Some decades later, probably in the second or third quarter of the sixteenth century, another draughtsman took up the incomplete volume and added drawings of his own, mostly landscapes, but also other subjects on 51 folio sides, not counting three instances where he added a drawing to one by the first draughtsman: in two examples (fol. 16 verso, 17 recto), landscapes with blue washes above drawings of birds in the lower half and in another (fol. 20 verso) a view of a fortress beneath a butterfly in the upper half of the page. Most of this second draughtsman’s drawings are in pen and brown ink, with only two coloured in (fol. 6 recto, 27 verso), filling the flesh-side openings which were left blank by the first draughtsman, from folio 3 verso up to folio 25 recto in the centre of the volume, the beginning of the fourth quire. From folio 31 recto to 46 recto he used the flesh-side openings only, drawing several double-page compositions, leaving most of the hair-side pages unused. In the end, 23 pages remained blank, including folios 47 verso and 48 recto which were used much later by one or two other draughtsmen, who also drew on the back pastedown.

Some drawings represent cityscapes and architecture, other than buildings in landscapes, such as the bisection of a Roman or all’antica theatre with two galleries on top of the sitting area (fol. 20 recto) and the ruins of a classical building (fol. 44 verso). Some buildings seem to represent or derive from medieval and early Renaissance architecture or Roman ruins, as yet unidentified, such as those on folios 13 verso-14 recto, 18 recto (Castello San Zeno, Montagnana?), 25 verso (Castello di San Martino in Aquaro, now Castelvecchio, Verona?), 27 verso and 40 recto (Castello Superiore, Marostica?). In some cases the draughtsman has attempted a accurate depiction by showing buildings and bridges reflected in the water (e.g. fol. 25 verso and 28 recto). The double-page drawing on folios 29 verso-30 recto, both sides more or less mirroring each other, derives from an anonymous Ferrarese woodcut of c.1505-15 representing the Madonna di Loreto, with the city gates and walls of Recanati and Ancona in the lower section.68 Our draughtsman probably copied more such architectural elements from various printed and painted sources yet to be identified.

The drawing on folio 44 verso is particularly interesting as it copies a woodcut illustration in Francesco Colonna’s popular novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published by Aldus Manutius (1449-1515) in Venice in December 1499, with a second edition in 1545.69 This incunable provided a source of inspiration for sixteenth-century artists because of the woodcut illustrations attributed to Benedetto Bordone (1460-1531), and it obviously did not escape the attention of our draughtsman either.70 One such woodcut depicts the ruins of the harbour and ancient temple of Pluto in Polyandrion (chapter 18, page 238).71 There are several discrepancies between the woodcut and our drawing, the most important being the absence of the couple Poliphilus and Polia at the far left, the use of hatching in the drawing to indicate shadows, and the natural instead of stylized indication of the water in the foreground.72 The fact that the two figures are left out, shows our draughtsman’s particular interest in architecture. Nevertheless, we have not encountered drawings directly related to (hypothetical) fifteenth- and sixteenth-century northern Italian drawing books containing architectural drawings, such as the Codex Destailleur and the Album Bonfiglioli-Sagredo-Rothschild, now both in Paris, but they share the same general interest in classical architecture and Roman remains.73 As a matter of fact, the latter album also has little coloured drawings of animals and birds interspersed with architecture on several pages.

The Drawings at the Back of the Volume

The drawings on the last two parchment folios (47 verso and 48 recto) and on the endpapers (49 recto, 49 verso-50 recto) seem to be much later and were probably executed by successive owners of the booklet. One is the F. or G. Durelli, whose signature is present on a drawing of a row of books with an open edition of the works of Virgil (Publius Virgilius Maro), such as the Cunningham edition of 1743 (fol. 49 recto). The signature’s initial is difficult to read and could either be an F. or G. or a ligature of both. The identity of the Durelli may be inferred from the pen drawing of a composite Corinthian capital (fol. 48 recto) which is probably related to G. & F. Durelli, La Certosa di Pavia, descritta ed illustrate con tavole incise dai fratelli Gaetano e Francesco Durelli (Milan 1823). Gaetano Marco Innocenzo Durelli (1789-1855)79 was a Milanese copperplate engraver of ornamental and architectural designs who worked with his brother Francesco (1792-1851).80 Both studied ornamental design and architecture at the Accademia di Belli Arti di Brera in Milan and Francesco was also a draughtsman and professor of perspective, specializing in architectural and furniture styles, especially the so-called Bramantesque.81 It is our guess that Francesco executed both the drawings of the books (fol. 49 recto) and the drawing of the Corinthian capital (fol. 48 recto).

The watercolour drawing of St Bruno (fol. 47 verso) is intriguing. This eleventh-century hermit saint and founder of the Carthusian Order was never officially canonized but his name was put on the Roman calendar in 1623. One would expect that the draughtsman was a follower of this saint, perhaps even a Carthusian monk. However, the Durelli brothers are not known to have had connections to the order. The drawing could well be related to the earliest known owner of the book, the Antonio Borri mentioned on the first flyleaf (fol. 0 recto) with the year 1631. The saint’s name Bruno was the nickname used by Cristoforo Borri (1583-1632), a Milanese Jesuit who travelled to India and Indochina as a missionary from 1615 to 1622.82 The person who added the inscription may have been referring to him in view of the drawings of exotic animals, which he thought were made by Borri on his journey to Asia.

The double-page landscape drawing with buildings and two towers on the last opening (fol. 49 verso-50 recto) repeats the similar composition by the second draughtsman on folios 45 verso-46 recto, but is not by the same hand, in view of the differently rendered foliage. It is probably not by Borri or the Durelli brothers and seems to be from the late sixteenth century.