Mauro Gandolfi

The parchment is wrapped around the original wooden backing. The work is overall in very good condition and fresh. Sold in an original bronze frame.
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This exquisite representation of the Holy Family belongs to a group of highly finished drawings by Mauro Gandolfi, executed in watercolour on vellum. The refined modelling and perfect rendering show the heights of achievement to which Mauro was capable of rising in this miniaturist technique.  These beautifully executed works must have been considered on very much the same terms as paintings, and were surely created to satisfy the demand for such images from sophisticated private collectors.  Some of these finished drawings are indeed copies after paintings by earlier masters, such as the Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Cristofano Allori, which Mauro copied while both he and the painting were in Paris, between 1801 and 1805.¹  (The painting had been taken to Paris, from its home in Palazzo Pitti, Florence, in 1799, was only returned in 1815.) 

Mauro, for his part, had chosen to go to Paris to perfect his skill as an engraver and watercolour painter, and to copy famous works by other masters, often with the intention that they should be engraved.  Indeed, during his time in Milan from 1819 to 1823, Mauro worked directly for print dealers, including Giuseppe Vallardi, for whom he executed for instance a print after Correggio’s Madonna with Mary Magdalene and Saint Jerome, based on a drawing that he had made from the original painting, after the latter’s return to Parma from France, in 1818. ²  

A fascinating aspect of Mauro’s art is the way in which he sometimes reused and adapted figures from one work to another.  For example, the figures of the Madonna and Child seen in the present drawing reappear, in reverse, in the Gandolfi’s print 'The Pilgrim', but there they are used to represent a female pilgrim holding a child (fig. 1).  Interestingly, Gandolfi’s first idea for the Madonna’s sleeve, concealed below the revised version that he has drawn on a separate piece of vellum hinged to the main sheet, is actually identical to the drapery seen in the print.  The beautiful young woman who appears here as the Madonna, with her unusual but presumably fashionable, broad hat held in place by a ribbon, is in fact also a reuse of an earlier motif, having previously been painted by Mauro as a young pilgrim, to the left of his bozzetto, in a private collection,³ for the altarpiece of St. Francis and the Pilgrims, executed in 1787-1792 for the church of Santa Maria delle Laudi, Bologna.

Stylistically, this splendid and extremely well preserved work can be closely compared with The Farewell, a drawing by Mauro in the same media that was formerly in the Horvitz collection and is now in another American private collection.⁴  

^1. P. Bagni, I Gandolfi, Affreschi Dipinti Bozzetti Disegni, Padua 1992, p. 498, cat. no. 469, reproduced

^2. Ibid., p. 500, cat. no. 471, reproduced

^3. Ibid., pp. 478-79, cat. no. 449, reproduced

^4. Sale, New York, Sotheby's, The Jeffrey E. Horvitz Collection of Italian Drawings, 23 January 2008, lot 95