drawing
- Museum number
- 1885,0110.21
- Description
-
A nude woman standing, seen from behind, after Marco Pino; holding a casket, a sash around her waist
Pen and brown ink, with brown wash
- Production date
- 1520-1590
- Dimensions
-
Height: 402 millimetres
-
Width: 247 millimetres
- Curator's comments
- Several years after the publication of Gere and Pouncey's catalogue, Giulio Bora attributed the higher quality Milanese drawing to Vasari, deeming it the original design from which the British Museum sheet was derived. This hypothesis has since been rejected by Andrea Zezza, who continues to favour Gere and Pouncey's view that both drawings are copies of a lost prototype of Pino's by different hands with different abilities.
Lit.: J.A. Gere and P. Pouncey, 'Italian drawings in the BM, Artists working in Rome', London, 1983, no. 233; G. Bora, 'I disegni della collezione Morelli', Bergamo, 1988, p. 96; A. Zezza, 'Marco Pino: L'opera completa', Naples, 2003, p. 341, no. F.16 (see also F.21, where the attribution of the Milan drawing to Vasari is rejected).
Gere & Pouncey 1983
As 'Anonymous Flemish' in the Departmental Register. Popham was the first to notice that the figure corresponds in all essentials with a drawing in the Morelli Collection in the Museo del Castello Sforzesco in Milan, inscribed with the date 1548 and with an attribution to Marco Pino in an old hand. This attribution seems to us reasonable, though we would not exclude the possibility of the Morelli drawing also being a copy, if of considerably better quality.
In the Morelli drawing the casket is larger and is held with the lid open as if the contents were being proffered to somebody, while on the ground, at the figure's feet, are a necklace and an empty quiver. The figure might originally have been part of a larger composition, perhaps an attendant holding a jewel box in a 'Toilet of Venus'. On the other hand the date on the Morelli sheet and its placing in a rectangular cartouche above the casket suggest that the drawing was intended to be complete in itself and was perhaps made for a print. Its emphatic contours and boldly simplified light and shade seem more appropriate to a chiaroscuro woodcut than to an engraving.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1885
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1885,0110.21
