Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Raffaellino Motta da Reggio
Codemondo (Reggio Emilia) 1550/1 - 1578 Rome
23
Portrait of a Young Woman
Pen and brown ink and wash, over black and red chalk. Bears inscription in red chalk:
Federigo Zucchari.
203 x 144 mm (8 x 5 ¾ in.)
Provenance: the artist Giulio Piatti (1816-1872),
Villa Piatti, Florence and by descent through the
Giuliana family.
Literature: Marco Simone Bolzoni, ‘The Drawings of
Raffaellino Motta da Reggio’, Master Drawings, vol.54,
no.2, Summer 2016, p.196, cat. A58 (A signifying
‘Autograph’), fig.86.
With the benefit of two recent studies of Raffaellino
da Reggio’s career as a painter and draughtsman, his
place as a rising star on the Roman art scene before
his premature death at the age of 28 has been made
abundantly clear. John Marciari analysed his formation
and described his activity in the Vatican under the
patronage of the Bolognese Pope Gregory XIII in an
article published in the Burlington Magazine in 2006. 1
Reggio Emilia, his birth place, is directly between
the cities of Parma and Bologna and Raffaellino was
trained as a painter in the studio of his fellow Emilian,
Lelio Orsi. Marciari describes him as falling under the
spell of Parmigianino but spending most of his career
in Rome, where he is thought to have arrived by 1570.
Raffaellino is generally labeled as a follower of the
Zuccaro brothers, to the extent that his drawings have
often been confused with Taddeo’s. In fact, Taddeo had
himself died prematurely, in 1566, a few years before
Raffaellino arrived in Rome and by the time he began
to work with Federico in 1572, Raffaellino had already
established himself through independent commissions
and collaborations with other artists such as Lorenzo
Sabatini. John Marciari sums up his artistic personality
as that of a largely self-formed eclectic … whose own
manner was forged from the study of many others,
a description which concurs with that given in the
biography by Giovanni Baglione: a Roma se ne venne,
come a vera scuola di virtù, e studio di ottimi Maestri
ripieno, a biography which the author summed up by
saying that if he had lived longer, Raffaellino would
have painted amazing things: cose di stupori nella
pittura. 2
The election of a Bolognese pope was an event of
critical importance to Bolognese artists who were
immediately given favour: though Vasari was asked
to continue the decorations in the Sala Regia of the
Vatican he employed an entirely Bolognese team of
assistants for the work. Raffaellino benefited from
this pro-Bolognese patronage for the rest of his
career collaborating on projects in the Sala Regia,
the Sala Ducale, the Sala del Concistoro Segreto, the
Cappella Commune and the Papal Loggia. He also
singlehandedly painted two large frescoes above the
entrance of the old St. Peter’s, which were destroyed
during subsequent building projects. This and other
losses of Raffaellino’s work of course contributed to
the diminishment of his fame; his activity as a façade
painter both in Reggio Emilia, under the training of
Lelio Orsi and independently in Rome appears to
have made him in Baglione’s eyes the heir to the
Roman tradition of façade decoration epitomised by
Polidoro da Caravaggio. Of the easel paintings made
for residences of the Roman nobility, a number of
which are recorded in old sources, only the Tobias
and the Angel in the Galleria Borghese survives;
therefore as Marco Simone Bolzoni has pointed out
in his 2016 assessment of the artist’s work: The many
drawings attributed to him, however, provide crucial
evidence of Raffaellino’s artistic personality and enable
us finally to restore to him the title of ‘caposcuola’ or
master, a designation that he rightly deserves in the
context of late Cinquecento art in Rome 3 . All the
façade decorations have been destroyed and only
the preparatory drawings remain as evidence of their
virtuosity, while a number of studies exist of pastoral,
mythological or allegorical subjects which were surely
intended as preparatory for domestic paintings 4 .
The present sheet, a vivid portrait study of a woman
shown in strong light, gently smiling, is a characteristic
example of a very particular group of Raffaellino’s
drawings, made from life, drawn with spontaneity and
character and perhaps made within the artist’s domestic
circle. Other comparable works are the Kneeling Noble
Woman (location unknown) and the Woman Nursing
a Child, a recto/verso sheet in the Castello Sforzesco
which shows the same calligraphic line, hatching and
use of red chalk as the present sheet 5 . The sympathy of
this likeness, the precision with which the features are
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