Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Mogliano 1720 - 1778 Rome
32
A Study of Four Figures in Various Attitudes (recto); pen experiments and sketches of eyes (verso)
Pen and reed pen and brown ink and wash with red chalk. Inscribed in pen and brown ink: M.P. M. aureli. Severi.
alexandri.Valerius. Primitius.fecit.
147 x 322 mm (5 ¾ x 12 ½ in.)
Provenance: Private Collection, France.
Piranesi had a highly individual approach to studying
the human figure. With little interest in academic
presentation, he seems hardly to have studied from
the studio model. His method appears to have
been to draw from life around him in the streets
and workshops and although his etchings are full of
small figures working or gesturing, it is unusual to
find one of his study sheets actually connected to a
print. Piranesi seems to have drawn figures to feed
his imagination, to stock his mind with examples and
to train his hand and perhaps as well, simply out of
fascination with the toings and froings of the people
around him, whether in the city or the country. In a
recent article, Andrew Robison summarised Piranesi’s
activity as a figure draughtsman and noted the changes
in style and treatment over the decades of his career 1 .
Those dating from the 1740s until the early 1760s are
often very small in scale, the actual figures measuring
between 40 and 90 mm During the 1760s, both the
study sheets and the figures themselves become larger
and more sturdy and in the next decade they grow
even more. In concentrating on certain drawings of
the 1760s which Robison has interestingly identified
as showing assistants in a printing workshop, he
describes Piranesi’s style at this point in time: the
figures are swiftly drawn in brownish black ink with a
reed or other broad-nibbed pen heavily emphasizing
their outlines with minimal interior delineation, their
faces likewise minimally delineated – just a triangle for
a nose, and dots and splotches for eyes. The drawings
of the late 1760s show Piranesi’s characteristically
nervous stroke and swift zigzag hatching. The present
work is particularly close in style and figure type to one
of the two pen and ink studies described and illustrated
by Robison, a horizontal sheet in the École des Beaux
Arts (inv.267), A Crouching Man and Two Workman
(198 x 397mm) dated to the mid 1760s and identified
by Alessandro Bettagno (to whom Andrew Robison’s
article is dedicated) as being amongst the master’s
most brilliant and important drawings 2 . Another highly
comparable work is the study of Four Men formerly
in the Janos Scholz collection, New York, which must
date from the same period 3 .
Piranesi often used whatever paper came to hand for
his figure drawings, thus many of them are sketched
onto the margins of pages from books and documents
and fragments cut from larger sheets already used.
Perhaps as a sign of increasing success and access to
materials, the drawings of the 1760s and 1770s can
sometimes be on entire sheets of a significant size and
quality. This drawing with its considerable size and
unusual shape is probably cut from an even larger
sheet, possibly before the figure studies were made.
The delicate straight lines which appear to have been
made first, in fine pen and ink, possibly had some
architectural or perspectival purpose and the classical
inscription is presumably copied from a Roman
monument, perhaps one which Piranesi owned and
may be part of a list of Roman Emperors. Piranesi
often made annotations or notes on his drawings and
the handwriting here may be compared with another
autograph inscription on a drawing in the Pierpont
Morgan Library, New York 4 . The rich red chalk used for
the series of firm lines like shading under the second
figure from the left is of a type often seen in Piranesi’s
studies, see for example the drawing of two figures
in the Louvre (inv. RF29003) 5 . In style and technique
the present study sheet compares closely with another
datable to 1765-1770 formerly in the collections of E.
Calando and Alfred Norman showing four figures in
various attitudes (250 x 173mm) 6 .
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