Lot 43
Venetian or Central Italian School, 19th c., "Angels Feeding Christ, after the Temptation by the Devil", pen and blue-grey wash on cream-colored laid paper, inscribed "Piranesi" in sepia ink, and "n. 5" in black ink, bottom left, 8 1/2 in. x 6 1/2 in,, in a modern mount numbered M5638 - 35 Provenance: Swann Galleries, New York; to James R. Lamantia, New Orleans and New York (by whom inscribed, on mount, "Possibly related to the Sackler drawing, Columbia-"). Note: The several incidents depicted (which are rare among Italian drawings) are most fully related in Matthew 4, 1-11 (though also mentioned in Luke 4, 1-13, and summarized in Mark 1,12-13). They describe the Devil's tempting Christ respectively in the desert, before a city, on the temple, and at the top of a high mountain, and then Christ being succored by angels after the ordeal. The drafting style is unusually uniform and unemphatic: it is presumably meant to suggest (if the attributional name is contemporaneous, which it seems from the ink color clearly to be) that Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) may have had a very early graphic training under some figurative master. But this is not the case, since he was trained at Venice by his maternal...
Please Note: Start Price USD $500
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