Echoes of the Past: Property from an Important Private Collection

Provenance:

Jacques Petit-Hory, Paris

Private Collection, Florida, acquired from the above, circa 1950s-60s

Mia N. Weiner, 2009

Jean-Luc Baroni, Ltd., London

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Literature:

Dominique Cordellier, Domenico Beccafumi, Paris, 2009, p. 12

Lot Essay:

Together with his Florentine contemporaries Jacopo Pontormo (1494-1557) and Rosso Fiorentino (1495-1540), Beccafumi ranks as one of the leading protagonists of early Italian Mannerism, and he is one of the most experimental and original masters of his time. During his career, he embraced a wide variety of artistic challenges (for instance providing the design and cartoons for the extraordinary marble floor in Siena Cathedral, 1519-29), applying his talent also to materials and media as varied as woodcuts, and the modelling and casting of bronze sculptures.

This handsome and rare work is part of a group of about twenty-five sketches, mostly head studies, executed by Beccafumi in oil on paper, which are directly or loosely connected to the master’s most prestigious commission, received on April 1529: the decorative cycle for the ceiling of the Sala del Concistorio, in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena (c. 1530-35). (P. Torriti, Domenico Beccafumi, Milan 1998, pp. 153-163) The present vivid head, though not specifically connected to the above decoration, is generally similar in type to more than one head to be found in the fresco cycle, which suggests that it was indeed conceived for one of the figures represented in this series of compositions based on the classical theme of civic virtue (exemplum virtutis), an inconography derived from Cicero’s De officis ('On Duties').

Executed with broad and fluid strokes, with wonderful pinkish and red touches used to highlight some of the facial features, this handsome head of a youth – his gaze to the left – is a masterful example of Beccafumi’s studies of this type, characterized by freedom of execution which strongly appeals to our modern eye. The beautifully applied highlights in the present sheet determine the fall of light and construct planes to accentuate volumes. Beccafumi works from dark to light to emphasize the intensity of this lyrical image, which has the spontaneity and immediacy of an impressionist sketch. Despite their links with his painted compositions, it seems likely that Beccafumi produced these oil studies as finished works of art, though he clearly left them unfinished, especially in the background to focus solely on the features of the heads. It is perhaps no coincidence that his self-portrait, today in the Uffizi, is executed in this same medium. (Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, inv. no. 1731; Torriti, op. cit., p. 272, no. D64, illus.)

Beccafumi's fascination with light and shade must have led him to this type of experimental work, a technique that would be embraced by several artists from the 17th century on, but was almost unprecedented in Beccafumi’s time. Through his great originality and technical accomplishment, Beccafumi succeeded in creating a ‘modern Sienese language,’ rooted in the artistic tradition of his native city.