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 <strong>Drawings</strong> of Raffaellino Motta da Reggio’, Master <strong>Drawings</strong>, vol.54, no.2, Summer <strong>2016</strong>, 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 <strong>2016</strong> 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 100
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