February 1st, 2012 § § permalink
The leading lot at Sotheby’s, in their 25 January 2012 sale, was a drawing attributed to Piero del Pollaiuolo. California’s Getty Museum bought the drawing. The beautiful portrait drawing of a young man has been variously given to the Paduan school, Marco Zoppo, and to the Mantegna circle. The Sotheby’s entry on the drawing is very detailed and can be found here.
Attributed to Piero del Pollaiuolo | Portrait of a Young Man | Black chalk, pen and brown ink on paper | 360 x 228 mm | Sotheby's Sale 25 Jan. 2012, lot 27
One of the works they compare lot 27 to is a drawing here in Rome at the Istituto Nazionale della Grafica. The Rome drawing is now assigned by the Istituto to Maso Finiguerra (a collaborator of the Pollaiuolo’s) although in the past it has been attributed to Francesco Pesellino, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and just simply 15th century Florentine school. The Sotheby’s cataloguers refer to the Rome drawing as by the Circle of Pollaiuolo. Just below is the Rome drawing and, at least to me, it looks as though it could be the very same sitter. Here is a link to the Istituto’s Maso Finiguerra drawing, where the image is of a better quality.
Maso Finiguerra | Profile of a Young Man | Pen and bistre ink, brush and brown watercolor, on ivory paper | 225 x 193 mm | Istituto Nazionale della Grafica, Rome
May 31st, 2011 § § permalink
Ramps, if they’re beautiful and designed by Francesco Borromini, are less tiring than stairs. That’s how it seemed last week when we visited the Accademia di San Luca’s permanent collection on the top floor of Palazzo Carpegna. The galleries containing paintings, the self-portraits of members, casts, terracotta bozzetti, and the temporary exhibitions of drawings have reopened after too long. The installation hasn’t been completed, but somehow there was something very satisfying about the way the “Lavori in Corso” gallery looked. There was a gallery of drawings with mostly architectural sheets. The Accademia has about 3,500 architectural drawings, and 2,000+ figure drawings. The weekly l’Espresso, in this article (undated) reported that some drawings went missing, noting especially drawings by Palma Giovane.
http://www.accademiasanluca.it/
Lavori in Corso | Door with Cutout | Accademia di San Luca | Rome
Lavori in Corso Room | Closer
Anatomical Drawings | Accademia di San Luca | Rome
Architectural Drawings | Accademia di San Luca, Rome
Casts Gallery | Accademia di San Luca, Rome
January 31st, 2010 § § permalink
The table below lists drawings collections that can be searched online. By clicking on the collection name, you will be brought to their search forms. The most useful of the sites are of the Louvre, Joconde (French state museums), and the British Museum. This table will be updated, not in this post, but at a page dedicated to web resources (left side of home page and called Resources and Links). The Tate has a number of interesting pages about the intricacies of putting their collection online and the initial page can be found here.
| Collection | Country | City/Loc. | No. of Drawings | No. of Drawings Online | Notes |
| Accademia Carrara, Ambrosiana, Brera, Poldi Pezzoli, and other Lombard Collections | Italy | Lombardy Region | | 3,223 | Site of the Beni Culturali, Lombardy |
| Albertina, Grafische Sammlung | Austria | Vienna | 50,000 | | 5,000 prints and drawings online. Drawings not broken out. |
| Ambrosiana, Biblioteca | Italy | Milan | 12,000 | 8,315 | |
| Art Institute of Chicago | USA | Chicago | 11,500 | 6,797 | |
| Ashmolean Museum - Oxford Univ. | UK | Oxford | | 5,090 | |
| Basel Kunstmuseum | Switzerland | Basel | | | 300,000 prints, drawings, and watercolors. 2513 online |
| Biblioteca Nacional | Spain | Madrid | 45,000 | | |
| Bologna – Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe | Italy | Bologna | 9,000 | 192 | |
| Boston Museum of Fine Arts | USA | Boston | | 712 | |
| British Museum | UK | London | 50,000 | | |
| Cleveland Museum of Art | USA | Cleveland | 3,733 | 3,733 | |
| Cologne – Wallraf-Richartz | Germany | Cologne | | 1,000 | 1,000 19th century drawings in database. 75,000 prints and drawings in coll. |
| Courtauld Inst. of Art | UK | London | | 7,260 | |
| Detroit Institute of Fine Arts | USA | Detroit | | 2,500 | 35,000 prints, drawings, photographs, watercolors, posters and artists books |
| Dresden – Staatliche Kunstsammlung | Germany | Dresden | | 377 | 500,000 works on paper |
| École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts | France | Paris | 65,000 | 33,694 | 20,000 drawings and 45,000 architectural drawings |
| Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts | USA | San Francisco | | | 70,000 works on paper |
| Fitzwilliam Museum - Cambridge University | UK | Cambridge | | 17,406 | 40,000 paintings, drawings, and prints |
| Flemish Art Collections – Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, the Groeninge Museum Bruges and the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent | Belgium | Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent | 40,000 | | |
| Getty Museum | USA | Los Angeles | 700 | 700 | |
| Harvard University Art Museums - Fogg, Busch-Reisinger etc. | USA | Cambridge | | 24,451 | Fogg has 12,000 drawings. |
| Istituto Nazionale della Grafica | Italy | Rome | | 7,132 | |
| LA County Museum of Art | USA | Los Angeles | | | |
| Leiden University | Netherlands | Leiden | | 12,489 | |
| Louvre | France | Paris | 140,000 | 140,000 | |
| MAK - Österreichisches Museum fuer angewandte Kunst/Gegenwartskunst | Austria | Vienna | | 16,932 | Wiener Werkstätte drawings
|
| Metropolitan Museum of Art | USA | New York | 15,000 | 23,871 | 56,663 prints and drawings |
| Morgan Library | USA | New York | 10,000 | 7,444 | Strangely, no images in database |
| Museum of Modern Art | USA | New York | 10,000 | 5,960 | |
| National Gallery of Canada | Canada | Ottawa | | 11,136 | 24,000 prints and drawings. 5,595 drawings with images |
| National Gallery of Denmark | Denmark | Copenhagen | 60,000 | 21,463 | |
| National Gallery of Scotland | UK | Edinburgh | 20,000 | 525 | |
| National Gallery, Washington, DC | USA | Washington DC | | 32,107 | 1,953 with images |
| National Library of Ireland | Ireland | Dublin | | | 100,000 prints and drawings |
| National Museum | Sweden | Stockholm | see note | 21,235 | 500,000 prints and drawings. 2,000 French drawings of Carl Gustaf Tessin. |
| Philadelphia Museum of Art | USA | Philadelphia | | 652 | 150,000 prints, drawings, and photographs |
| Prado, Museo Nacional del | Spain | Madrid | 6,300 | 556 | |
| Princeton University Art Museum | USA | Princeton | 7,000 | 1,133 | |
| Rijksmuseum | Netherlands | Amsterdam | | 3,495 | 800,000 prints, drawings, and photographs |
| Royal Academy of Arts | UK | London | | 1926 | |
| Royal Collections - Windsor etc. | UK | Windsor | 40,000 | 1,072 | |
| Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium | Belgium | Brussels | | 2,018 | |
| Smith College Museum of Art | USA | Northampton | 1,600 | | Smith shares database w. area colleges |
| Tate | UK | London | | 48,041 | Unique Works of Art is phrase used on site. |
| Uffizi and other State Museums in Florence | Italy | Florence | | 3,780 | 145,000 records of paintings, sculptures etc. drawings not broken out. Uffizi has 120,000 prints and drawings. |
| Victoria & Albert | UK | London | | | 1,000,000 objects online. Data for drawings not broken out. |
| Walters Art Museum | USA | Baltimore | | 900 | 19th c. French Drawings |
| Yale University Art Gallery | USA | New Haven | 8,174 | 8,174 | |
August 16th, 2009 § § permalink
The French win. Of the three websites on my bookmarks toolbar for researching drawings, two are French: Joconde and the Louvre. The other is the British Museum. I return to these again and again. You’d think that America, the land of computing and the World Wide Web, would have magnificent, complete resources, but no. German electronic resources are also uneven.
The legacy of Diderot and the state structure of French museums have made their research websites remarkably strong.
The Louvre has 140,000 drawings online. For results, each page delivers 5 entries, mostly with thumbnail images that are sufficiently readable (unlike the BM, where the thumbnails are a bit small). If there are too many results, say for Stefano della Bella (there are 688 results or 138 pages) and it becomes laborious going through them all, I then switch to Joconde which gives 100 results per page, and includes the Louvre and other state collections. The Louvre’s images are richer, so I weave back, via inventory number (listed under oeuvres), to view the better images.
The British Museum’s database is also close to heavenly. Results include prints which can be good, but also overwhelming.
