Poppy Harvey-Jones
Head of Sale
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Lot 7
Tuscan School16th CenturyCleopatra
5 December 2018, 14:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street£25,000 - £35,000
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Tuscan School, 16th Century
Cleopatra
oil on panel
58.8 x 95cm (23 1/8 x 37 3/8in).
oil on panel
58.8 x 95cm (23 1/8 x 37 3/8in).
Footnotes
Provenance
With the Arcade Gallery, London, 1966
Private Collection, Vienna
Sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 14-15 November, 1990, lot 37 (as School of Fontainebleau, circa 1590)
Private Collection, Trieste
With Antichita' Pietro Scarpa, Venice
Where purchased by the present owners
The figure of Cleopatra in the present panel reveals a clear debt to the work of the Florentine Mannerists of the second half of the sixteenth century. Artists such as Jacopo Pontormo, Giorgio Vasari and Michele di Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio all closely followed, and indeed copied, the largescale nudes painted or drawn by Michelangelo. One such example is the latter's cartoon of 1532, showing Venus and Cupid (possibly now in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, inv. 86654), which provided the source for Pontormo's work now in the Accademia, Florence (n. 1570) and Vasari's copy now in the Royal Collection (RCIN 405486). It is, however, the last painter, Michele di Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio who comes closest in type to the present painting with works such as his Allegory of Night and Allegory of Dawn, now in the Galleria Colonna, Rome, both in turn derived from Michelangelo's sculptures for the Medici Chapels in the church of San Lorenzo, Florence.
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