18th Century Drawings Collecting

https://www.horti-hesperidum.com/show.php?item=228

L’ottavo fascicolo (IV, 2014, 2), curato da Francesco Grisolia, è intitolato Studi sul Disegno italiano tra Connoisseurship e Collezionismo e comprende contributi, riflessioni e novità sull’attività grafica di diversi artisti dal Rinascimento al Novecento, così come su collezionisti e nuclei di grafica. Connoisseurship e collezionismo dialogano e si intersecano in questa raccolta dedicata al disegno italiano. Per il Cinquecento sono presenti: Bernardino Luini, Aurelio Luini e Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, di cui si esamina la pratica di firmare e annotare i disegni; il gusto per l’antico della scuola di Fontainebleau tra Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio e Léonard Thiry attraverso un foglio apparso sul mercato. Il disegno del Seicento si muove tra Firenze e Napoli: uno studio stilistico e iconografico che prende le mosse da un bozzetto di Lodovico Cardi detto il Cigoli e già ascritto a Francesco Curradi; un altro con novità sui disegni del napoletano Aniello Falcone. Sempre a Napoli ci conduce l’esame di un bozzetto su carta di Domenico Antonio Vaccaro e sul suo processo creativo. Sono presenti ricerche sulla raccolta del vicentino Pietro Stefanoni, antiquario-editore in rapporto con Cassiano dal Pozzo e Sebastiano Resta, e sul fondo di grafica del Museo Civico di Pescia, dove spicca la collezione del frate pittore Alberico Carlini da Vellano. Chiude il volume un’analisi sul disegno italiano a cavallo tra gli anni Sessanta e Settanta del XX secolo attraverso le idee e le opere di alcuni protagonisti.

In the Proceedings of the International Study Conference ‘Il contributo di una famiglia del Canton Ticino allo sviluppo dell’arte e dell’architettura barocca a Roma: riflessioni sul contesto italiano e europeo di Giacomo, Giovanni Battista e Pier Francesco Mola’ (Mendrisio, Accademia di architettura, June 6 – 7, 2013), edited by Jörg Zutter & Adriano Amendola.

The collector and biographer F.M.N. Gabburri provides extensive information regarding young Tuscan draughtsmen who were involved first in Richard Topham’s volume Bm13  (Eton College Library), illustrating the sculptures in the Medici Grand Ducal Gallery, and then in significant printmaking projects. The present article shows Gabburri’s interest in recording the presence of Grand Tourists and British artists, such as William Kent, obtaining drawings by and portraits of foreign painters and at the same time interacting with English diplomats, in particular John Molesworth, and with the more progressive Tuscan intellectuals

Four recently identified drawings by Giacomo Cavedone for frescoes in the Church of San Salvatore, Bologna, prompt a review and reassessment of a group of drawings in the Hermitage Museum linked with the artist. All were acquired in 1768 with the collection of Count Charles Cobenzl, most having apparently been in the Paris collection of Pierre Crozat.

Studies of eighteenth-century collecting in the Swiss cantons have had relatively little material to work with in terms of drawings. The picture was very different in each canton, but drawings were still largely concentrated in established major centres of production. Well into the 1700s they continued to be seen as working material, passed from hand to hand or kept in the workshop to be copied, and there were only a limited number of non-Swiss/German works in circulation. Looking at collectors in Basle, Yvonne Boerlin-Brodbeck found just two concentrating on works on paper, both in the second half of the century. But Johann Caspar Füssli, portrait painter and writer of Zurich, took advantage of the state of the market in Zurich to form what seems to have been a remarkable collection, frequently referenced in his biographical dictionary of Swiss artists. With the help of Boerlin-Brodbeck's research, it has been possible to identify a number of drawings deriving from Füssli's collection now in the Hermitage Museum. They arrived as part of the collection of Charles Cobenzl, having been supplied to him by the Swiss gentleman Rodolphe Valltravers.

The Drawings Department of the State Hermitage Museum has only a relatively small collection of Swiss and German works. It has been established that many of them derived from the collection of Count Charles Cobenzl (1712-1770), who in turn acquired them from the Swiss gentleman Rodolphe Valltravers. Although not himself either greatly learned or a collector, Valltravers corresponded with many of the leading lights of the eighteenth century, such as Carl Linnaeus, Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, facilitating the exchange of information and scientific samples. From the correspondence between Valltravers and Cobenzl we know that many of the Swiss and German drawings were acquired from the painter Johann Caspar Füssli, (1706-1782), author of a biographical dictionary of Swiss artists. Johann Caspar’s son, the “English” painter Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) copied many of the drawings in his father’s collection, including works now in the Hermitage. Just why Füssli sold his drawings is not known, but we might suggest that he hoped they would perform a function similar to that of his publications and, through their presence in the collection of an important diplomat such as Cobenzl, inform the world of the achievements of Swiss art.

This article adds a drawing in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg to a series by the Flemish-born artist Matthieu Elias, of which ten are in the Metropolitan Museum. The series illustrates the life of Dom Jean de La Barrière (1554–1600), founder of the French Order of Feuillants, whose opposition to the Catholic League and support for the religious tolerance of Henry III and Henry IV of France led to his persecution. In 1587 Henry III founded a Feuillant monastery in Paris; in the 1620s just over half the forty windows in the cloister were filled with painted glass showing the life of Jean de La Barrière, but the remaining nineteen windows were to be completed only 1701–1709. Designed by Matthieu Elias, they were highly regarded in the eighteenth century. Removed to the Musée des Monuments Français in Paris in the wake of the Revolution, the glass was lost when this was dispersed in 1816. The drawings are thus our best record of the once-famous glass of the Couvent des Feuillants. The author identifies the subjects and considers the purpose of the drawings, whether as models for the glass-painters or as finished presentation sheets.

In recent years there has been increasing attention to works from the school of Raphael, which often reflect on lost works by the master himself. The Hermitage in St Petersburg has a number of drawings that arrived with the collection of Count Charles Cobenzl in 1768 which, while clearly copies, relate to lost designs or to projects emerging from Raphael's workshop. The paper also looked at the tale of 'original cartoons by Raphael' for the Acts of the Apostles, seven huge canvases that were in Moscow in the 19th century. They caused a furore and the question of their attribution led to heated polemics on the pages of the Russian press. In 1863, however, they disappeared and have not been seen since.

Dmitry Mikhaylovich Golitsyn formed a collection of over four thousand drawings during his thirty years as Russian ambassador in Vienna. He arrived in Vienna after five years in Paris, bringing with him what might be called a 'French' fashion for collecting drawings. In Vienna itself the collecting of drawings was only just taking off, making Golitsyn a central figure in the process. His collection remained intact - in Vienna and then in Moscow - until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was sold in Europe. Drawings are today to be found in museums and private collections, particularly in France and Britain, by far the most of Golitsyn's possessions being the small book of copies after Holbein's 'Dance of Death' by the young Rubens (now Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp). A noted patron of Mozart, Golitsyn had a small pavilion in the Prater and a hunting lodge on the Predigtstuhl just outside Vienna, which came to bear his name: Gallitzinberg.

Colloquium: L’empire de Catherine la Grande / The Empire of Catherine the Great. Nouvelles approches
Paris, 27–29 May 2019

https://www.singer-polignac.org/fr/missions/sciences/colloques/2433-l-empire-de-catherine-la-grande-nouvelles-approches#pjobst

Catherine the Great founded the now internationally-renowned drawings collection of the Hermitage Museum with the purchase in 1768 of the cabinet of Count Charles Cobenzl (Brussels). At a time when there were no collections of drawings in Russia, no collectors to emulate, and no established tradition, the purchase of over four thousand drawings was a radical act, far more innovative than the purchase of paintings. What led Catherine to make the purchase? What was its purpose? Did she herself understand the significance of the acquisition?
So much has been said and written about the influence of foreign writers and thinkers on Catherine and her policies, particularly as relates to the arts, that less insistent voices stressing the role played by Russians in shaping and informing her understanding of the role of the arts in the immediate period after she came to power sometimes go unheard.
Looking at Catherine’s correspondence and analysing the chronology and nature of Catherine’s collecting of things other than paintings, it becomes clear that in the first years of Catherine’s reign she owed much to the advice and knowledge of several Russians who had spent time in Europe. It was men such as Ivan Betskoy, the éminence grise of Catherine’s cultural projects, Dmitry Mikhaylovich Golitsyn and Dmitry Alexeevich Golitsyn who persuaded her of the significance of artistic policies overall, but it seems also to be they who convinced her that the possession of a collection of drawings was a necessary mark of ‘belonging’ to a European intellectual elite. Between 1755 and 1761 Ivan Betskoy was travelling in Europe with his niece and her husband – Dmitry Mikhaylovich Golitsyn. They spent considerable time in Paris, not the only place where drawings were being actively collected but the centre of theoretical discussions of the value and purpose of drawings collections. Young Dmitry Alexeevich Golitsyn also came into contact with them in this period. So it is telling that the first collections of drawings formed by Russians belonged to Betskoy and D. M. Golitsyn and that D. A. Golitsyn was to be the intermediary for the purchase of the Cobenzl drawings, to buy at the Muilman sale of drawings in later years, and to form his own collection of Dutch drawings.
The European experience of these men in the second half of the 1750s and early 1760s was key to Catherine’s understanding of the importance of art as a political and propaganda weapon. Was she also influenced by the example of Stanisław Poniatowski, who was to form his own important collection of drawings? And did Catherine, whose attitude to art was markedly pragmatic, truly see the function of drawings as the object of collecting (in contrast to their function as, for instance, an aid to study for those training at the Academy of Arts), or was their possession merely part of her desire to be seen to have the right cultural credentials, to be a truly European monarch?