Pastoral Concert with Two Women, a Faun and a Soldier

NOTE: This is the earliest acquisition at the Morgan from the large group of drawings owned by Janos Scholz that have long been catalogued as coming from the "Moscardo-Calceolari collection, Verona." While the Moscardo provenance can be confirmed, the link to the collector Francesco Calzolari (1522-1609) and the Musaeum Calceolari is based on the statements of Luigi Grassi and Frits Lugt that Moscardo had acquired the drawings from Calzolari, but recent scholars (e.g. Karet 1998, 36) have contested this claim; the often-repeated idea that the Moscardo collection passed to Calceolari is simply mistaken. The Moscardo collection was likely formed in large part by Count Lodovico Moscardo (1611-1681), although a number of drawings are by later artists, or have what appears to be a later collector stamp (Lugt 321), which indicates that there were additions to the collection at least into the eighteenth century. The collection then passed down through the family until the early twentieth century, when it seems to have been sold in several large groups. One was bought by Luigi Grassi in 1905: there are examples from this set in the Albertina, the Lugt Collection, the Lehman collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere, including the Morgan (inv. 1987.20, 1988.79, and 1993.112). Most of Scholz's drawings from the Moscardo collection (including this sheet) come from another group that emerged in Milan around 1947 and were purchsed by Francis Matthiesen. Some (including the famous Badile album) went to London, but Matthiesen sent more to Switzerland, where they wound up with the German-born Mario Uzielli (1888-1973), from whom Scholz acquired this group in 1949. Many were formerly described as having been bought in Zurich in 1949, which may have been where Scholz met Uzielli, but the latter was otherwise based in Liestal, near Basel.
Watermark: none.