Bernardo Strozzi Genoa 1581 - 1644 Venice

Alfred Kadisch sale, Vienna, C.J. Wawra, September 22-24, 1930, lot 51;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, July 5, 1989, lot 12.
  

L. Mortari, Bernardo Strozzi, Rome 1966, pp. 189-190, reproduced plate 67.

A bozzetto by Bernardo Strozzi for his oil painting, sold London, Sotheby's, 8 July 1987, lot 43 (see L. Mortari, p. 175). Strozzi's use of oil sketches was relatively rare and appears to have begun around 1620-1625 with the bozzetto for Horatius Cocles defending the Bridge (Mahon collection, Mortari, p. 143, fig. 144) a study for the documented ceiling frescoes in the Palazzo Carpaneto at Sampierdarena near Genoa of 1623-1625. A sketch in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, a design for a silver dish, is dated in the same period by H. Macandrew (Burlington Magazine, cxiii, January 1971, p. 7), and a similar date also seems reasonable for the present vivacious and naturalistic oil sketch. Strozzi's use of such studies may have been inspired by the numerous well documented autonomous bozzetti that were produced in Genoa for Gian Carlo Doria a few years earlier by the Milanese artist, Giulio Cesare Procaccini.