Stefano della Bella

This drawing would appear to be closely related to a series of twenty-three drawings by Stefano Della Bella that were at one time bound into an album bearing the title 'Le Maraviglie del Mondo nuovo, fatti per il Divertimento del Principe Fernando di Toscana di lui scolare'. (Although the title of the album states that the drawings it contained were intended for the amusement of Della Bella’s pupil, the Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’Medici, it may be noted that the artist was not in fact a drawing master to Ferdinando, but rather to his young son, the future Duke Cosimo III.) The album was sold at auction in London in 1930 and the drawings it contained, all in pen and brown ink and grey wash, were then dispersed. The drawings from the Maraviglie del Mondo nuovo album, each similar in size and technique to the present sheet, comprised genre scenes of groups of dwarves occupied in everyday activities. Drawings from the album are today in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, as well as in several private collections. In theme and subject, the present sheet comes closest to a drawing of a parade of dwarf soldiers in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, while similar turbanned figures appear in another drawing from the series; an Oriental Audience that was in a private collection in New York in 1977.

As Françoise Viatte has noted of these drawings, which she dates to late in the artist’s career, ‘It may be that the dwarf themes appealed to [Della Bella] not only because of his interest in the unusual so apparent in his graphic work, but also because of their suitability to the small formats that he preferred…The artist’s intentions are satirical and not comic. Della Bella’s burlesque is cold and grating caricature, with no place for laughter...It is quite clear then that although Stefano’s Bambocciate may have been executed as a private pastime, they reflect the contemporary taste for the unusual, for that “invenzione bizarissima” which [Filippo] Baldinucci places in the Florentine tradition.’