drawing
- Museum number
- 1936,1010.16
- Description
-
Two men facing one another, head and shoulders in profile, both wearing hats
Pen and brown ink
- Production date
- 1478-1490
- Dimensions
-
Height: 65 millimetres
-
Width: 105 millimetres
- Curator's comments
-
Lit: A.E. Popham and P. Pouncey, 'Italian drawings in the BM, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries', London, 1950, I, no. 252, II, pl. CCXIV (with previous literature)
-
Popham & Pouncey 1950
The attribution to Sperandio, instead of the traditional one to Pisanello, is due to Hill (loc. cit.), who was struck by the unmistakable general resemblance between the bust of the old man on the l. and some of the portrait medals by Sperandio, and who noticed a particular resemblance to the medal of Antonio Sarzanella de' Manfredi (Hill, 'Corpus', no. 358) signed "OPVS SPERANDEI". He called attention, however, to certain differences (the nose is longer in the medal; the wart and the fur round the neck are absent in the drawing), which, in our opinion rightly, prevented him from stating the identification as proved. As supporting evidence he cited a pen and ink drawing, by the same hand, of a girl's head and shoulders, then in the Walter Gay Collection and now in the Louvre (no. R.F. 28919; repr. Hill, 'Burlington', p. 27), which, for reasons he does not give, he believed to have been part of the same sheet, and which he thought bore a certain resemblance to a figure on the reverse of another medal signed by Sperandio (Hill, 'Corpus', no. 397). Hill in 1909 thought the most probable date for the drawings was between 1478 and 1490 "or later", when Sperandio was working in Bologna. In his 'Corpus', however, he dated the Sarzanella medal about 1463. We think that the costume favours this earlier date.
Literature: G. F. Hill, Burlington, xvi (1909), p. 24 (repr. p. 27).
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1936
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1936,1010.16