Pietro Testa

Dr. A. Ritter von Wurzbach Tannenberg (according to 1969 exhibition catalogue; no collector's mark visible);
Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 12 January, 1990, lot 152;
Walter Lees,
his sale, Christie’s, London, 16 July 2010, lot 121

 

Milan, Stanza del Borgo, Disegni italiani e stranieri del Cinquecento e del Seicento, 1969, p. 75, no. 48, as "Melancholy."

E. Cropper, The Ideal of Painting. Pietro Testa's Düsseldorf Notebook, Princeton 1984, p. 262, reproduced, fig 116;
Pietro Testa 1612-1650, Prints and Drawings, exhib. cat., Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988, p. 234, fn. 3

Drawing attached to mount by numerous threads that are connected to the mount - recto and verso visible in the window mount. The upper left corner of the recto has been made up. Some light brown staining around the edges of the sheet. Black chalk remains strong. Light staining around edges of the verso, perhaps old glue stains where sheet was previously laid down. Red chalk still strong. Sold in a modern frame.
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This study was previously considered to be for a female figure that appears in Testa's etching, Summer, to the left of the figure of Apollo in the centre of the composition.  While the pose is indeed reminiscent of this etched figure, Elisabeth Cropper has, however, demonstrated that the drawing is in fact a preparatory study for Testa's painted decorations in the apse of the Roman church of San Martino ai Monti.

In the 1640s the prior of San Martino ai Monti, Giovanni Antonio Filippini, embarked on an ambitious project to redecorate the Carmelite church in preparation for the Jubilee Year of 1650.  One of the projects given to Testa was an altarpiece of The Vision of Sant'Angelo Carmelitano.  So impressed was the prior by Testa's efforts that he asked the artist also to redecorate the apse.  Testa made extensive sketches and preparations for the ceiling but unfortunately his work never saw fruition as the project was never realised. 

There are seven other known preparatory drawings for this project: four at the Uffizi and one each at the British Museum, London, the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, and the Niedersächsisches Landesgalerie, Hannover.¹  The Dusseldorf drawing is a sketch that lays out the entire scheme for the apse and gives us an insight into this elaborate, ambitious project.²

Testa's designs reveal that the semidome apse was to depict the mantle of the heavens drawn back to show the Apocalyptic Vision of St. John.  In the centre he would have represented the Victory of the Cross and on either side of the Cross he would place four personifications of virtues.  Cropper believes our study might be for one of the Virtues but also suggests that it may represent a figure in the upper register.

1.  Exhib. cat., Philadelphia 1988, op. cit., p. 234, fn. 3

2.  Idem, p. 232, fig. 107a