Cesare Dandini

Carlo Volpe, Bologna;

With Mattheisen Gallery, London, 1981;

Private collector, Florence;

His sale, Florence, Pandolfini, 16 November 2022, lot 39;

Where acquired by the present collector.

S. Bellesi, Cesare Dandini, Addenda al catalogo dei dipinti, Florence 2007, p. 19;

F. Baldassari, La Pittura del Seicento a Firenze, Turin 2009, p. 255.

Ajecco, Musée Fesch, Florence au Grand Siècle, June - October 2011;

Bologna, Museo di Santa Maria della Vita, La donna nell'arte tra sacro e profano, November 2011 - January 2012.

This technically refined and intellectually astute painting typifies the artistic production of the Florentine Baroque painter Cesare Dandini. The simply-attired woman holds a smattering of brushes in her left hand as she draws the small bronze statue of Venus and Cupid that stands on a pietra serena table at right. The painting's conceit, that drawing is the foundation of both painting and sculpture, also plays on the very notion of disegno, understood to encompass both the act of drawing and the artist's ability to conceive an image in his or her mind's eye. Beginning in the fourteenth century, disegno had been understood as the central component of the creative process in Florentine art, a conviction later codified by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists.

Dandini produced at least two versions of this composition: the present work and a slightly larger iteration, formerly in a Bolognese collection.¹

¹ See S. Bellesi, Cesare Dandini, Turin 1996, pp. 84-89.