Francesco Furini

As one scholar has recently written, ‘An artist deeply embedded in the Florentine tradition, Furini obsessively created preparatory drawings for his works. A vast number of surviving sketches and drawings indicate his meticulous effort to discover ideal arrangements for his figures.’ This double-sided sheet presents various studies for the composition of a painting of the Biblical subject of Lot and his daughters. Furini produced at least two autograph paintings of the subject of Lot and his Daughters, each different in composition; one canvas painted for the Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici and today in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and the other commissioned in 1645 by Duke Jacopo Salviati for the Villa Salviati near Florence and now in the collection of the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze. (A third version of the subject is mentioned by Filippo Baldinucci as having been ordered from Furini by the Marchese Francesco Ridolfi, but no longer survives, unless it can be identified with a large canvas of The Wife of Lot Turned into a Pillar of Salt in the Fondazione Horne in Florence). Although no preparatory drawings by Furini that can be definitively related to either extant version of Lot and his Daughters have thus far been identified, the present sheet may contain the artist’s initial ideas for the composition of one or both paintings.

The pose of the seated female nude seen from the back and stretching out her arm, at the lower right of the recto of this sheet, is found in Furini’s painting of The Three Graces in the collection of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, which is datable to the early 1630s. A similar figure is also seen in what is arguably Furini’s masterpiece as an easel painter, the Hylas and the Nymphs of c.1632-1633 commissioned by the banker Agnolo Galli and now in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. A preparatory drawing by Furini for the same nude figure is in the Louvre. The same pose is repeated in the reverse orientation at the upper left centre of the present sheet and is also found in a red chalk study of a single female nude in the Uffizi, which has been attributed to both Furini and his pupil Vincenzo Manozzi8. As has been pointed out, ‘the repeated depiction of back views of nude women within Furini’s paintings suggest the erotic implication of such views.’

As Catherine Monbeig Goguel has noted, ‘Furini shares with all of the artists who trained directly or through their own master at the school of [Ludovico] Cigoli (Cristofano Allori, [Giovanni] Bilivert, [Sigismondo] Coccapani, [Andrea] Commodi) the practice of multiple studies, accumulated on the same sheet. This way of working allows for the rapid juxtaposition of various arrangements of the same subject or subjects of a different nature, mixing the sacred and the mythological, but involving the same compositional canon. The ability to arrange figures dynamically, a gift for layout, the subtlety of corrections and revisions are all characteristics of these study sheets.’ A number of comparable drawings containing red chalk studies of different compositions by Furini are in the Uffizi.

Both sides of the old mount on which the present sheet is inlaid are stamped with an as-yet unidentified collector’s mark - a coat of arms with a shield surmounted by a crown, all within a double oval - that has been found on a handful of Italian drawings.