Baccio BANDINELLI

This large and impressive sheet by Baccio Bandinelli provides an interesting example of the 16th century Florentine sculptor finding inspiration in the work of one of his illustrious predecessors. The central section of this drawing is based on part of Donatello’s bronze reliefs on the two pulpits in the Florentine church of San Lorenzo, executed in the early 1460s and one of the Renaissance sculptor’s final works. The pulpits include a frieze of putti at play running above the main scenes, and Bandinelli has here adapted the central part of his composition from a section of Donatello’s putto frieze that appears twice, once above the relief of The Resurrection of Christ on the north pulpit and again above the Lamentation over the Dead Christ on the south pulpit. 

Donatello’s San Lorenzo pulpits provided a rich visual source of motifs for later artists, and Bandinelli seems to have made several drawings from them. (Bandinelli made numerous copies after the works of Donatello, a practice in which he was apparently encouraged by Leonardo.) As the Bandinelli scholar Roger Ward has noted, however, the present sheet is not necessarily a direct copy of Donatello’s frieze and may instead return to the source of the Renaissance sculptor’s inspiration; an antique sarcophagus formerly in the Strozzi collection in Florence and now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Similar studies of putti at play by Bandinelli appear on the recto of a drawing in the Fondazione Horne in Florence, while another example is in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt.   

The first recorded owner of this drawing was the German banker and collector Everhard Jabach IV (1618-1695), a native of Cologne who settled in Paris in 1638 and became a naturalized French citizen in 1647. It was in France that Jabach began to amass a formidable collection of paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, creating arguably the greatest private collection in France in the 17th century. In 1662 Jabach sold most of his collection of paintings to King Louis XIV, followed in 1671 by the sale to the Crown of much of the rest of his collections, including 5,542 drawings. Jabach did not, however, sell all of his drawings, and retained a number of significant works, including the present sheet. He also continued to collect drawings, and by 1695, when a posthumous inventory of his collection was made, some 4,500 drawings, mostly by Italian artists, were listed. 

This drawing by Bandinelli was among a group of more than four hundred drawings purchased from the Jabach heirs, at an unknown date, by the eminent collector Pierre Crozat (1665-1740), whose famous collection of drawings numbered 19,201 sheets. The Crozat collection was dispersed at auction in Paris in 1741, in a sale catalogued by Pierre-Jean Mariette and held over a period of more than a month, which included around 120 drawings by Bandinelli, divided into six lots. This drawing was then acquired by Gilbert Paignon-Dijonval (1708-1792), whose collection included some six thousand drawings and around 60,000 prints. Paignon-Dijonval’s collection was inherited by his grandson Charles-Gilbert Morel de Vindé (1759-1842), who had the collection catalogued in 1810 before selling it to the English art dealer and collector Samuel Woodburn (1753-1853).