Piero Buonacorsi, PERINO DEL VAGA

This lively red chalk study by Perino del Vaga, with its swirling contours, suggests the artist’s searchfor a rhythmic composition before defining either narrative or anatomy with precision. The scholar Catherine Monbeig Goguel has aptly described Perino’s ‘ability to make even the slightest stroke vibrate, whatever the purpose of the drawing or the material used’ as one of his most striking qualities as a draughtsman. 

The style and subject of this spirited drawing would suggest that it dates from the final phase of Perino del Vaga’s career, when he was working on his last major fresco cycle; the extensive decoration of the papal apartments of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, executed between June 1545 and his death in October 1547. In particular this drawing may be related to the frescoes illustrating the story of Psyche in a room in the Castel Sant’Angelo known as the Sala di Psiche, for which the final payment to the artist was made in May 1546. A somewhat comparable figure of a crouching female nude, albeit without the attendant putti seen in the present sheet, appears at the right of a fresco of Psyche Discovering Cupid and Cupid Fleeing in the Sala di Psiche.

A late pen and ink drawing by Perino in the British Museum, identified as Psyche Tormented by the Servants of Venus, repeats many of the characteristics of the nude in this drawing, and shows the artist working in an equally spontaneous and animated manner. Like the present sheet, the British Museum drawing, which depicts similar crouching female nudes, is only tangentially related to the Sala di Psiche frescoes, but must be of the same approximate date and may have served a similar purpose, when the artist was working out ideas for the fresco decoration of the room. 

If the present sheet was not intended to be used for a narrative scene, its narrow upright format, as well as the rough vertical lines drawn at the left and right edges of the sheet, suggest it may perhaps have been used to prepare a figure in a niche flanking a larger narrative composition, such as is found, for example, on the walls of the Sala Paolina of the Castel Sant’Angelo, painted in 1547. Certainly, the composition of twisting, animated figures set within a confined space would be appropriate to such a purpose. While the small study of an isolated putto on the verso of the present sheet was perhaps drawn to finalize the pose of one of the putti on the recto, it may be noted that similar putti also appear throughout the frescoes by Perino and his studio in the Castel Sant’Angelo, as for example in the Sala del Perseo. Indeed, a similarly posed putto is found on both sides of a pen and wash drawing by Perino del Vaga in the British Museum, which can be related to the frieze decorations in the Sala del Perseo. 

It has been suggested that Perino may have taken the complicated and sinuous pose of the female nude in this drawing from an antique Hellenistic bronze sculpture of Venus Binding her Sandal, known through several later sculpted copies as well as a drawing by the 16th century Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck, showing the statuette from three different angles, in a sketchbook of c.1532-1536 now in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin. It may also be noted that the pose of this sensual figure is close to that of a satyress at the edge of a very large engraving of a Bacchanal by Marcantonio Raimondi of c.1510-1520, which records a relief sculpture on an ancient Roman sarcophagus that was at that time in the garden of the church of San Marco in Rome. Just over half a metre in length, Marcantonio’s erotic engraving is known in two versions, one in the same direction as the sculpted Bacchic relief and the other in reverse. The same satyress was copied or adapted by other artists, notably Giovanni da Udine and Amico Aspertini, and was also reproduced as an etching by the German printmaker Jacob Binck around 1530.