Carlo Antonio BUFFAGNOTTI

Previously attributed to the Florentine draughtsman and etcher Stefano Della Bella (1610-1664), this fine drawing, as Anna Bianco has confirmed, is by Carlo Antonio Buffagnotti. The present sheet is, in fact, one of Buffagnotti’s earliest works and was presented by the artist to the composer Giovanni Battista Bassani sometime around 1684. 

In a recent doctoral thesis on drawings related to musical manuscripts, Anna Bianco devoted much of an entire chapter to the present sheet. As she writes, ‘Buffagnotti aimed to impress his contemporaries and secure patronage through meticulously crafted designs incorporating musical compositions. These compositions served as “artistic offerings” and strategic endeavors to gain recognition and further opportunities in the art world…Unlike the printed dedications of the period, which followed a set of codified rules, Buffagnotti’s manuscript presentations operated through a different logic: they were conceived as unique, richly decorated artefacts offered as gifts but with the clear expectation of financial compensation.’

The lyrics of the music which form the central motif of this drawing are excerpted from the secular cantata Ardea di due begli’occhi by Giovanni Battista Bassani (c.1650-1716), to whom Buffagnoti presented the present sheet as a token of his friendship. The theme of the cantata is unrequited love, and, although the text is fragmentary, it can be read as ‘Dimmi fortuna / parlami al Core piaga d’Amore si risarò / cieca importuna tu dici nò nò cieca impor- / tuna tu dici cosi(?) nò nò’, while the text continues at the bottom of the sheet with a brief extract from a later passage in the cantata, with the words ‘eri pur felice o’. (A rough translation would be: ‘Tell me, Fortune, speak to my heart, it feels like the wound of love has healed, blind persistence you say no, no, blind persistence you only say no, no...you used to be happy, oh...’) The Ardea di due begli’occhi (also sometimes known as Amante non creduto) was published as part of a collection of Bassani’s cantatas in 1684, shortly before the composer left Bologna to settle in Ferrara, and Buffagnotti’s drawing must date to around the same time. 

As Bianco writes, ‘Buffagnotti’s gift to Bassani reflects the tradition of presenting drawings as meaningful tokens, dating back to the sixteenth century. These drawings, considered autonomous works of art, offer a direct link to the artist’s creative process. Buffagnotti’s meticulous incorporation of Bassani’s cantata excerpts into the drawing mirrors this tradition, infusing the artwork with profound meaning: through deliberate symbolism and fragmented representation, he pays homage to the composer’s musical legacy while engaging in a nuanced dialogue between visual and musical expression.’ Buffagnotti is known to have presented similar drawings or prints as gifts to his contemporaries; a comparable example, likewise indebted to decorative motifs originally invented by Della Bella, is found in an unpublished etching of a Musical Capriccio of 1693, dedicated by Buffagnotti to the Venetian singer Piera Ghei, in the collection of the Civico Museo della Musica in Bologna.

Much of Buffagnotti’s work in the early part of his career reveals the influence of Stefano Della Bella, and in particular the ornament prints commissioned from the Florentine artist by Parisian publishers. The motif of the seated nymphs in the present drawing finds parallels in some examples from a set of decorative etchings by Della Bella, the Raccolta di varii cappriccii et nove inventioni di cartelle et ornamenti published in Paris in 1646, while the nymphs and the form of the vase itself are akin to those found in Della Bella’s suite of six etchings of several different designs for vases, published as Raccolta di vasi diversi in c.1646. Indeed, the nymphs in the present sheet are particularly close to those flanking one of the vases in one of the Raccolta di vasi diversi etchings.