Presented here is a selection of 17th century drawings in stock.  Please click on a thumbnail to view further information on the work, as well as an enlarged image of the entire drawing. Six thumbnail images are shown per page; click on the red page number at the lower right to view another page.

Attributed to CRISTOFANO ALLORI

Florence 1577-1621 Florence

Landscape with a Grove of Trees, a Town in the Distance

Black chalk, with touches of red chalk.

Inscribed Titiano in brown ink at the lower left of the 17th century Italian mount.

178 x 189 mm. (7 x 7 3/8 in.)

On the basis of a photograph, this drawing has recently been tentatively attributed by Miles Chappell to Cristofano Allori. As Chappell has noted, Allori ‘made many drawings of scenes and vignettes of nature...His picturesque views of Tuscan scenes with rustic houses and winding roads framed by twisting trees with sinuous branches and graceful, detailed clusters of leaves are unified by an atmospheric quality deriving from...soft, often blunt chalks.’

CLEMENTE BOCCIARDO, called IL CLEMENTONE
Genoa c.1600-1658 Pisa
A Male Nude Kneeling on a Rock, His Arms Raised
Black chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk, on light brown paper, laid down on a 17th or 18th century Italian mount.
Inscribed di Clemente Bocciardi d^o il Clementone in the lower margin of the mount.
400 x 276 mm. (15 3/4 x 10 7/8 in.)

Drawings by Clemente Bocciardo are extremely rare. The present sheet, which has the appearance of having been drawn from a posed model, may be related to Bocciardo’s establishment of a school of life drawing in his Genoese studio in the later 1630s. At the same time, however, the way in which the figure is drawn, with its strong echoes of contemporary Florentine draughtsmanship of the period, would argue in favour of a later date in the 1640s or 1650s, when the artist was working in Tuscany. The distinctive 17th or 18th century Florentine mount that surrounds the sheet, and its likely provenance from a Florentine collection, would further suggest that the drawing may date from Bocciardo’s later years.

Borgo San Sepolcro 1582/3-c.1656 Florence

A Tuscan Landscape with Figures by a River

Pen and brown ink and wash.

260 x 407 mm. (10 1/4 x 16 in.)

Relatively little is known of Remigio Cantagallina's life and career, which was spent mostly in Florence. Described by Filippo Baldinucci as ‘famous for his landscape drawings in pen’, Cantagallina was particularly influenced by the work of such Northern artists as Paul Bril. He was, in turn, to be an important influence on the later generation of landscape draughtsmen working in Florence, including Ercole Bazzicaluva, Baccio del Bianco and Jacques Callot. A prolific artist, Cantagallina produced a large number of highly finished topographical views of Florence and other sites in Tuscany, drawn with warm brown washes, that are among his finest achievements. Many of these drawings were almost certainly intended as independent works of art.

This large, finished landscape drawing is a typical example of the work for which Cantagallina is best known, and for which he was praised by Baldinucci. Almost certainly intended as an autonomous work of art, it is likely to have come from an album of over a hundred landscape drawings, formerly in the collection of the scholar and antiquary Henry Wellesley (1791-1866), that appeared at auction in London in 1954. The album was acquired by the dealer Hans Calmann and the drawings were dispersed over the next several years; examples are today in the Frits Lugt collection at the Institut Néerlandais in Paris, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Princeton University Art Museum, and elsewhere.

DOMENICO MARIA CANUTI

Bologna 1620-1684 Bologna

The Parting of Rinaldo and Armida

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in red chalk.

189 x 258 mm. (7 1/2 x 10 1/8 in.)

Domenico Maria Canuti trained with Guido Reni, Guercino, and Giovanni Andrea Sirani in Bologna, where he worked for most of his career. His first known painting is a canvas of The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia for a church in Imola, and although he continued to paint both altarpieces and easel pictures throughout his career, it was as a ceiling fresco painter that Canuti came to be best known. Among his most important patrons were the Pepoli, a noble Bolognese family who commissioned a series of frescoes for the Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande. These included an Apotheosis of Hercules on Olympus for the ceiling of the gran salone of the palace, painted between 1660 and 1670, and the artist’s most famous work. The fame of this project led to a number of Roman commissions, and Canuti worked in Rome for five years from 1672 onwards. In 1676 he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, but was back in Bologna the following year. The remainder of his flourishing career was spent working mainly on the decoration of the monastery of San Michele in Bosco.

Canuti was known for his inventive compositions, and produced a number of drawings on literary or mythological themes, most of which do not seem to have been intended as studies for paintings and may have been produced as finished works of art for sale to collectors. The present sheet is one of several drawings by Canuti depicting scenes from the story of Rinaldo and Armida, taken from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata; others are in the Louvre, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.

LUDOVICO CARRACCI

The Head of a Sleeping Boy

Red chalk.

111 x 121 mm. (4 3/8 x 4 3/4 in.)

On the basis of photographs, Babette Bohn has suggested an attribution to Ludovico Carracci for the present sheet. She further points out that that stylistic comparisons may be made with a handful of chalk drawings of the late 1580s by Ludovico, including a study of a nude boy asleep in the British Museum and a sheet of studies of heads in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

GIACOMO CAVEDONE

Sassuolo 1577-c.1660 Bologna
Recto: A Man Rowing

Verso: The Head of a Woman, Looking to the Left

Black chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk, on pale blue-grey paper. The verso in black chalk.

340 x 262 mm. (13 3/8 x 10 3/8 in.)

This large and striking study of a male nude is a fine and typical example of Cavedone's bold draughtsmanship. Several of Cavedone's drawings are directly inspired by figures in his master Ludovico Carracci's paintings, and the recto of the present sheet is one such example. The drawing finds its source in the boatman in Ludovico Carracci's painting of The Return from the Flight into Egypt, generally dated to around 1598-1600 and today in a private collection in Bologna.

FRANCESCO MONTELATICI, called CECCO BRAVO

Florence c.1601-1661 Innsbruck

Saint Agatha

Red and black chalk.

249 x 193 mm. (9 3/4 x 7 5/8 in.)

Little is known of the artistic education of Francesco Montelatici, known as Cecco Bravo apparently on account of his violent temperament. He is thought to have been a pupil of Domenico Passignano and Matteo Rosselli, under whose supervision he worked on several fresco cycles in Florence in the 1620s. By 1629 he had established his own studio in Florence, where Cecco Bravo worked for most of his career. Among his most significant works in Florence were wall frescoes for the Sala degli Argenti in the Palazzo Pitti, painted in the late 1630s, while he also contributed to the decoration of the Casa Buonarroti.

Cecco Bravo has only relatively recently been recognized by art historians as one of the most original and distinctive artists of the Florentine Seicento. He was a gifted draughtsman, and although a large number of drawings by him survive, only a handful may be related to surviving paintings. This sheet is a fine and typical example of Cecco Bravo’s manner, characterized by the use of a combination of red and black chalk and a feathery, seemingly insubstantial depiction of form. While the drawing is unrelated to any surviving painting by the artist, it may be noted that in 1655, near the end of his career, Cecco Bravo received a commission for an altarpiece of The Madonna with Saints Mary Magdalene and Catherine of Alexandria for the church of San Romano in Pisa. At the same time, he also painted two canvases of standing female saints for the entrance walls of the same chapel; a Saint Lucy and a Saint Agatha, and the present sheet may have been a preparatory study for the latter painting.

Florence 1610-1664 Florence

A Man on a Horse in a Landscape

Pen and brown ink.

Laid down on a late 18th century or 19th century mount.

139 x 190 mm. (5 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.)

From an album of miscellaneous, mostly Bolognese drawings, assembled by a certain Mr. Yeates in Italy in 1823, this lively sketch is typical of Stefano della Bella’s interest in everyday rural life, and his keen observation of the world around him. The drawing is likely to date from relatively early in the artist's career, when he was working in Florence and Rome before his move to Paris in 1639. At this time he seems to have often worked outdoors, filling several sketchbooks with lively scenes of people, buildings and festivities, all drawn on the spot and used as a stock of images and motifs for his etchings and more finished drawings. A closely comparable pen and ink drawing of a horseman at a fountain, probably drawn in Rome, is in the collection of the Louvre, and was later used for an etching from the series Diverses figures et griffonnemens of c.1646.

Florence 1610-1664 Florence

Landscape with a Farmhouse

Pen and brown ink.

Inscribed Stef^o: della Bella at the lower right.

151 x 210 mm. (5 7/8 x 8 1/4 in.)

Only a handful of paintings by Stefano della Bella survive to this day, and it is as a graphic artist that he is best known. A hugely talented and prolific printmaker and draughtsman, he produced works of considerable energy and inventiveness, with an oeuvre numbering over a thousand etchings, and many times more drawings. Della Bella’s lively drawings display a keen observation of country life and pursuits, and he seems to have often worked outdoors filling several sketchbooks with scenes of people, buildings and festivities; all drawn on the spot and used as a stock of images and motifs for his etchings and more finished drawings.

Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

The Head of a Man Wearing a Hat, in Profile to the Right

Pen and brown ink.

270 x 182 mm. (10 5/8 x 7 1/8 in.)

The biographer Giovanni Battista Passeri, in a visit to Guercino’s studio, noted that he saw there ‘a number of drawings by his hand, of dances, festivals, and weddings, all decorously conducted in his Rocca di Cento, imitating the ideas, the demeanour and the appearance of these rustics, and of these foretane of the country, which were, in truth, curious and well-captured.’ The present sheet is a fine example of the type of character drawing Passeri would have seen, and belongs with a group of studies, probably drawn from life, which Guercino produced throughout his career. The result of the artist’s acute observation of the people he saw around him in the small town of Cento, these genre studies—of shopkeepers, peasants, labourers, noblemen and others—also allowed him to indulge his interest in physiognomy. Often sympathetic yet sometimes verging on caricature, these drawings were often not executed as studies for paintings but were intended rather as visual exercises, done for the artist’s own pleasure. The model for the present sheet was used for the figure of Cato in two drawings in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, both of which are preparatory to a painting of Cato at Utica Saying Farewell to his Son After Having Decided to Commit Suicide of 1637, today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille.

Camerano 1625-1713 Rome

Recto: The Head of a Young Boy

Verso: The Penitent Saint Peter

Red chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk, on blue paper. Inlaid on an 18th century mount.

Inscribed Di Carlo Maratti in brown ink on both sides of the mount.

267 x 204 mm. (10 1/2 x 8 in.) [sheet]

413 x 319 mm. (16 1/4 x 12 1/2 in.) [mount]

The head of a child on the recto of this drawing is a preparatory study for small winged putto in Maratta’s painting of The Death of Saint Joseph, dated 1676 and today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The painting was commissioned from Maratta by the papal legate Cardinal Alberizzi for the private chapel of the Empress Eleonora Gonzaga of Mantua, wife of the Emperor Ferdinand III, in the Hofburg in Vienna. The study of a penitent saint on the verso of the sheet remains unconnected to any surviving work by Maratta, and would appear to be a study for an unknown painting.

The present sheet was once part of an album of drawings by Carlo Maratta and other artists, in all likelihood assembled in the late 17th century or early 18th century. The album included twenty-seven chalk drawings by Maratta, most of which were preparatory studies for paintings. The drawings in the album were laid onto mounts inscribed with the names of the artists; the handwriting is no later than the early 18th century and would appear to be that of the collector or connoisseur who assembled the album.

Genoa 1627-1703 Genoa

The Triumph of Bacchus

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, squared for transfer in red chalk.

Inscribed Lepiola in brown ink at the lower right.

Laid down on an 18th century French mount, with the anonymous mountmaker’s drystamp ARD (Lugt 172) at the lower right of the mount.

231 x 310 mm. (9 1/8 x 12 1/8 in.)

Domenico Piola remains one of the most prolific Genoese draughtsmen of the 17th century, despite the fact that many of his drawings were destroyed in a fire in his studio caused by the naval bombardment of the city in 1684. Piola’s facility as a draughtsman was aptly described by his biographer Ratti, who notes that the artist ‘used to spend the whole evening drawing at the small table, setting down ideas on paper in pen with light shading in bistre...the facility of this method of drawing came no less easily to him than that of painting. Hence he made so many drawings that besides the largest number destroyed by a fire in his house and apart from those in the possession of foreigners and other painters in the city, his heirs preserved more than four thousand of them. And the wonder is that in such a copious number, one never encounters in any one example an invention similar to others already executed by him.’ With its spirited use of pen and wash, the present sheet is a fine example of Piola’s fluent draughtsmanship. Although squared for transfer, it remains unrelated to any known painting or fresco by the artist.

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