DAY & FABER master drawings

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DAY & FABER master drawings

    Pietro da Cortona (Cortona 1596 - Rome 1669)

    Waterfalls in a hilly landscape

    Description:

    point of brush and brown ink and wash over traces of black chalk
    216 x 289 mm

    Provenance:

    Kunstveilingen Mak van Waay B.V., Amsterdam: 10 June 1975, cat. 246, Lot 67 (as attributed to Bartholomeus Breenbergh)
    Sotheby’s, New York: 14 January 1992, Lot 18
    with Baskett & Day Ltd, London
    where acquired by the present owner in January 1992

    Literature

    J.M. Merz, ‘Landscape Drawings by Pietro da Cortona’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 2004, Vol. 39 (2004), pp. 139-140, fig. 16

    Note:

    Landscape drawings only account for a small but intriguing portion of Pietro da Cortona’s extensive graphic corpus and although he is better known for his innovations in the field of illusionistic fresco painting, a group of approximately 20 drawings attests to Cortona’s experimentations with the drawn landscape and the refinement of his technique over the course of a long career. The present drawing is a relatively late example, dated by Jörg Martin Merz to around 1650, and it demonstrates the virtuosity of Cortona’s later brush and wash drawings. The drawing depicts a mountainous landscape with a waterfall flanked by two hermitages. As first proposed by Merz, the drawing’s arched outline and the existence of comparable, lunette-shaped designs suggest that this is a preparatory study for the right half an unidentified fresco lunette.

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    Waterfalls in a hilly landscape