An album containing 95 drawings by Seventeenth Century Italian artists

This group of 95 drawings has a very long and eventful collecting history. The drawings, mainly sheets with studies of hands, arms, and legs by artists active in Bologna during the 17th Century, were gathered and pasted onto the pages of a large album in the 18th Century (Bolognese Album). Of the original binding, only the handwritten title page that describes the album’s contents survives: Raccolta di varj studj de’ seguenti pittori maestri Bolognesi cioè Brizzi, Tiarini, Massari, Garbieri, Cavedone, Spada, Buonone, Lanfranco, e Guido Reni ecc. Come pure di Simone Cantarini Pesarese, Flaminio Torri, et altri degni allievi di detto Guido (fig. 1; J. Scholz, ‘Notes on the history of the Bolognese drawings in the exhibition’, in Drawings from Bologna: 1520-1800, exhib. cat., Oakland, College Art Gallery, 1957, n.p.). From the style of the handwritten title and because of the apparently Bolognese flavor of the drawings, it is possible to infer that the album was assembled in the 18th Century and most likely in Bologna. The album originally contained 383 drawings, but it was disbound when, at the beginning of the 20th Century, it was acquired by the Albertina in Vienna (Meder, op. cit., p. 7). Joseph Meder (1857-1934), director of the museum, removed the drawings from the album and began to catalogue them individually. Meder ‘was so fascinated by the abundance of beautiful material consisting mainly of hands and arms, that he seriously planned a book on hand-studies of all times and all schools. Unfortunately, this book was never completed’ (Scholz, op. cit.). The drawings were later declared the property of Archduke Friedrich of Habsburg and sold to various collectors. A large group of drawings ended up in New York in the collection of Janos Scholz who, in turn, sold many of them, while donating a group of more than forty, including the album title page, to the Morgan Library and Museum. Most of the drawings in the Morgan group have proved to be by Emilian artists, while a smaller number are by artists from other Italian schools. Other drawings from the Bolognese Album are now scattered in various private and public collections. Some sheets, for example, are in the Princeton University Art Museum (C. Van Cleve and L.M. Giles, Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, 2014, nos. 110, 123, ill.).

The album offered here is a collection of drawings removed from the original Bolognese Album and reassembled in a later volume bound in red morocco. Some of the pages reveal that several drawings have been removed and handwritten annotations in English were added to suggest attributions of the sheets to specific artists. The largest number of drawings is given to Alessandro Tiarini, other sheets to Guido Reni, Domenichino, Giovanni Lanfranco, Annibale Carracci, Carlo Bononi, and Carlo Cignani. Although it is difficult to establish attributions for all of the sheets, it is possible to connect some of Tiarini’s studies to existing paintings. For example, a drawing of a Left hand supported by another hand (a) corresponds to Mary’s and the dead Christ’s hands in the Pietà in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna (fig. 2; M. Pirondini, Alessandro Tiarini (1577-1668), Reggio Emilia, 2000, no. 88, ill.). An arm pointing outwards (b) is a study for the arm of the figure on the right in the painting Joseph's bloodied clothes shown to Rachel and Jacob recently on the market (fig. 3; Sotheby’s, New York, 27 January 2022, lot 142). The only drawing in the group that is a compositional sketch (c) can be connected with Tiarini’s altarpiece Saint Martin resuscitating a child in the Museo di Santo Stefano in Bologna (fig. 4; D. Benati and B. Ghelfi, Alessandro Tiarini. L'opera pittorica completa e i disegni, Milan, 2001, no. 66, ill.).

Three interesting anatomical studies (d), presumably cut out from a larger sheet, stand out for their attempt accurately to represent the anatomy of the muscles of the arm. There are no suggested attributions for these studies, but the annotator singled them out as ‘important’.

Fig. 1. Title page to Album of Bolognese drawings. The Morgan Library and Museum, New York.
Fig. 2. Alessandro Tiarini, Pietà. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna.
Fig. 3. Alessandro Tiarini, Joseph's bloodied clothes shown to Rachel and Jacob. Private collection.
Fig. 4. Alessandro Tiarini, Saint Martin resuscitating a child. Museo di Santo Stefano, Bologna.