Pasted Quadratura Drawings A Focus on the Collection of the Prints and Drawings Department in the Louvre Museum

Résumé 0

Illusionistic perspective painted on ceilings, called quadratura since Filippo Baldinucci's time because of the squared ("inquadrato") framing of paintings, 1 flourished first in the area of Brescia as well as in the Emilia-Romagna 2 and then, from the second half of the 16th-century, it spread throughout the Italian peninsula. 3 Thanks to the studies by Jürgen Schulz, Ebria lblatt and Ingrid Sjöström, among others, the evolution of this genre is well known. The projected plan of the frescoes required an accurate preparation on paper, but the understanding of this preliminary phase is far less developed. Research has been mostly conducted on drawings of specific groups of artists, such as Agostino Mitelli (1609-1660) and Angelo Michele Colonna (1600 or 1604-1687), 4 or on collections, like the body of works assembled by Antonio Certani (1879-1952) that has been put on display a few years ago at 1 Filippo Baldinucci was the first historiographic writer who used the word quadratura. See Filippo Baldinucci, Vocabolario toscano dell'Arte del disegno di Filippo Baldinucci Fiorentino, Florence 1681, p. 130: "[…] E quadratura trovasi esser detto all'Arte del dipigner prospettive, cioé dipignere di quadrature che par voce non molto propria." See also Ingrid Sjöström, Quadratura: Studies in Italian Ceiling Painting, Stockholm 1978, p. 11: "[…] The term acquired its present meaning in painting at the end of the 17th-century. It enjoyed sporadic use much earlier, however, within a special field: namely the art of making proportionate, perspective drawings of the human body based on a sketch of a doll-like figure composed of cubes. As far as is known, Lomazzo alone uses the name quadratura to refer to these drawings, which may of course be derived directly from the primary meaning in this case." 2 See Jürgen Schulz, A forgotten chapter in the early history of quadratura "painting", in: The Burlington magazine 103 (1961), pp. 90-102 and Jürgen Schulz, Cristoforo Sorte and the Ducal Palace of Venice, in: Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 10 (1961/63), pp. 193-208. 3 The genesis of deception painting studies is a lecture given by Sir Anthony Blunt in 1959. Anthony Blunt,