Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

captured and the informality of the visible part of the
woman’s dress make it improbable that this is a study
for a formal portrait and most likely it is a depiction
of a woman Raffaellino held in his affection. The
curious manner in which the hair is depicted, in tight
ringlets by the ears and with a peaked element of curls
above the forehead, appears as an oft repeated feature
in Raffaellino’s drawings of women, a Morellian
convention highly typical of the artist.
Bolzoni describes Raffaellino as combining diverse
artistic experiments with élan: the elegant formal
refinements of Correggio and Parmigianino, … and the
compositional manner of the brothers …Zuccaro. He
identifies a method in Raffaellino’s draughtsmanship:
the silhouettes being sketched in chalk and then gone
over in pen and ink to define and give greater detail,
...with the use of wash to define shadows, often applied
in broad bands of colour, the confidently rounded pen
strokes; and the long, distinctive crosshatching that
recurs in all the artist’s autograph works, almost as a
signature. Raffaellino’s drawings were clearly admired
and preserved during and after his lifetime; the architect
Ottaviano Masarino, who probably worked alongside
the artist in the Vatican, gathered together an album of
Raffaellino’s drawings some years after his death and
bequeathed it, with part of his estate to the Accademia
di S. Luca, although at the time the will was executed
the album was in the house of the painter Lavinia
Fontana to whom Mascarino had lent it. The album
is now considered lost but record of it demonstrates
the esteem in which Raffaellino’s preparatory work
was held. The present work was clearly also lost from
Raffaellino’s oeuvre, believed, as the inscription in red
chalk testifies, to be a drawing by Federico Zuccaro.
It’s recent discovery amongst a group of Italian 16 th
century drawings owned by the Florentine painter
Giulio Piatti, adds a highly distinctive and fascinating
sheet to the drawn works of this remarkable artist.
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enlarged detail