Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Design for a Wall with Roundel with Virgin and Child and Infant Saint John the Baptist, Flanked by Putti Standing on Pedestals. Verso: Fragment of Four Concentric Rectangles

Italian School
16th century

Design for a Wall with Roundel with Virgin and Child and Infant Saint John the Baptist, Flanked by Putti Standing on Pedestals. Verso: Fragment of Four Concentric Rectangles

ca. 1520-1535
5 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches (147 x 135 mm)
Pen and brown ink, over black chalk and stylus indentations, on paper; roundel at center and putti sounding trumpets in spandrels drawn on separate pieces of paper and pasted on to design; verso: four parallel, ruled U-shaped lines in pen and brown ink, over stylus indentations.
II, 25a

Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.

Notes
Watermark: none.
One of 34 sixteenth-century Italian drawings formerly mounted in a nineteenth-century album, the Cesare da Sesto Album.
Description

This sheet was once part of the Cesare da Sesto album, and formerly associated with four anonymous drawings that were placed immediately after it in the bound collection.1 It does not, however, agree with the homogenous style of this group of drawings, in which the figures are more abstracted and drawn with a lighter and looser pen line. Inv. II, 26a-29a also differ in content – they record existing works, particularly grotesques, and include inscriptions noting the locations of their sources.

Footnotes:

  1. Morgan Library & Museum, New York, inv. II, 26a, 27a, 28a, 29a.
Inscriptions/Markings
Inscribed at upper right, in black chalk, "10".
Associated names
Murray, Charles Fairfax, 1849-1919, former owner.
Morgan, J. Pierpont (John Pierpont), 1837-1913, former owner.
Morgan, J. P. (John Pierpont), 1867-1943, former owner.
Classification
Century Drawings
School
Department