Graceful and true: drawing in Florence c. 1600 - Cover Story

Apollo, Jan, 2004 by Minna Moore Ede

'Gratioso, delicato, e vero' wrote Francesco Scannelli in 1657, when describing art in Florence around 1600. A partial translation of his encomium serves as the title of the beautiful exhibition of late sixteenth-century Florentine drawings currently on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This is the first dedicated exhibition of Florentine drawings from this period--covering the years between 1575-1625--in the UK, and presents a diverse group of artists, many of whose names are not well known today (Baccio del Bianco, Remigio Cantagallina, Jacopo Confortini), above all because they have always had to play second fiddle to their more famous renaissance and mannerist predecessors. However, the exhibition makes the point well that this was in another sense the golden age of Tuscan disegno, following the establishment of the Accademia del Disegno in the city in 1563, when artists drew prolifically and enthusiastically, in a variety of styles and techniques, with the result that many new genres--notable among them caricature and book illustration--emerged. The primacy of drawing in Florence in this period is certainly in sharp contrast to the situation in Rome, where not a single drawing by Caravaggio survives, and justly deserves its moment of glory. Over eighty drawings are on display in the show, all from British collections, including--in addition to the Ashmolean itself and the Christ Church Picture Gallery, also in Oxford--the National Gallery of Scotland, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The exhibition documents the two major--albeit very different--artistic commissions that dominated late sixteenth-century Florentine patronage: the decoration of the cupola of Florence Cathedral, and the designs for the wedding celebrations of Ferdinando de' Medici and Christina of Lorraine in 1589. There are some magnificent drawings by Federico Zuccaro, who was awarded the commission to complete the cupola fresco in 1576 after Vasari's death in 1574, and completed the decoration in 1579, including two very large, rather hilarious sheets, representing the deadly sins, delicately coloured with pink and brown washes (Fig. 3). The Counter-Reformation was, of course, in full force by this date (the edicts on art were published after the Council of Trent had finished in 1563), and its effect on religious art was not always a happy one, as Federico's eventual fresco of The Church Triumphant (fig. 5 in the catalogue) in the cupola testifies. Alessandro Allori's stunning black chalk study for Mary Magdalen (no. 1) is the notable exception to this in the show, and indeed one of its highlights, ironically, although it is the earliest drawing in date, it heralds the full force of the baroque Counter-Reformation style more than any other. For one is reminded that this was the first generation of artists that had to adapt to the constraints that the Tridentine decrees placed on religious art, and as the work of an artist like Cosimo Gamberucci (no. 53), a pupil of Santi di Tito, makes clear, this often had a rather limiting effect on religious compositions. However, as the catalogue points out, 'The demand of the Counter-Reformation church for clear religious subject matter seems to have been counterbalanced by a secular demand for a much wider range of subject matter ...' (p. 34). This secular subject-matter is given full rein by the second major commission of this period, the designs for the Medici wedding celebrations in May 1589, and indeed it is this alternative strand of art that the Ashmolean's exhibition unveils so impressively.

An integral part of the festivities were six spectacles, or intermezzi, short works of dance or music, now recognised as the origins of modern day ballet and opera, that were performed between the acts of a play, and in this instance repeated three times during the month of wedding celebrations. The exhibition includes some marvellous designs for these, including Bernardo Buontalenti and Andrea Boscoli's collaborative sketch for a festival chariot pulled by a winged dragon (no. 23) (Fig. 2). Dragons breathing real fire were apparently a speciality of the ingenious Buontalenti. Cigoli's dynamic pen and ink study for a painting of Charles of Anjou defeating Manfred at the battle of Benevento (no. 34), which was to decorate the first structure on Christina of Lorraine's route into Florence, displays precisely the type of spirited draughtsmanship that artists from this period excelled in. Another specialist in ephemera of this kind and scenography was Baccio del Bianco, whose extraordinary caricatures, for which he was particularly celebrated, are an early form of the cartoon strip. A drawing from the Ashmolean's own collection (no. 8) reveals Baccio's wicked sense of humour. It depicts a group of gnome like alchemists earnestly engaged in the search for gold; all over the drawing, interspersed between the pink, green and blue washes are patches of powdered gold.

[FIGURES 2,3&5 OMITTED]