Master Art

The present sheet is a typical example of Giovanni Battista della Rovere’s robust draughtsmanship. Like his brother, the artist favoured the use of blue paper, often with extensive areas of white heightening to intensify the tonal contrasts. Also like Giovanni Mauro, he often signed and dated his drawings on the verso, as can be seen on the present sheet, usually inscribing his initials JBR together with the year and month (and sometimes the exact date) that the sketch was made. Although unsigned drawings by the two brothers are not easy to attribute to one or the other, it has been noted that Giovanni Battista’s drawings tend to ‘differ from his brother’s in their more ornamental contour and less volumetric drapery.’

Among stylistically comparable drawings by Giovanni Battista Della Rovere are a study of The Meeting of Saints Carlo Borromeo and Filippo Neri in the Albertina in Vienna and a drawing of Saint Ambrose Tries in Vain to Take the Body of Saint Dionysus to Milan (which, like the present sheet, is dated 1618), formerly in the Marquis de Lagoy and Flury-Hérard collections; that drawing is a study for a fresco in the small church of San Dionigi in Cassano d’Adda, near Milan. Also similar is a drawing of Moses in the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum in Budapest, which is a preparatory study for a fresco in Sant’Angelo in Milan, and a study of A Bishop Saint (Ambrose?) Exorcising the Devil in the Art Institute of Chicago.

The present sheet bears the collector’s mark of the Romanian physician and scientist Ioan (Jean) Cantacuzino (1863-1934), a member of the illustrious aristocratic Cantacuzino family who assembled a fine collection of drawings and prints of various schools. At his death, a group of works was donated by his widow to the Toma Stelian Museum in Bucharest, which later became part of the National Museum of Art of Romania. Most of the rest of the collection was dispersed by the collector’s heirs in two auctions in Paris in 1969.


Pen and brown ink and grey wash, extensively heightened with white, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, on blue paper.