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JACOPO VIGNALI (Florence 1592-1664)
Head of a young man, looking down |
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Black and red chalk, with touches of white chalk
309 x 234 mm.
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This meticulously-hatched, yet immediate study of a young man, with evident similarities to the drawing style of Carlo Dolci, appeared recently on the European art market with an attribution to Agnese Dolci , an attribution that was subsequently confirmed by Francesca Baldassari , based on a comparison to the three red and black chalk studies by Agnese in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. It has since has been disputed by several scholars.
We would suggest that a more convincing comparison to our drawing can be made with two red and black chalk portrait drawings by Jacopo Vignali, an artist of great importance in the development of Carlo Dolci who entered the older artist’s studio at the age of nine. Both of these drawings, a pensive study of a young woman wearing coral beads, recently on the London art market , and another sheet in the Lugt Foundation, Paris , could also easily be mistaken for works by Dolci, but both bear convincing inscriptions in the hand of Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri confirming their attribution to Vignali. These drawings exhibit a sensitive approach to facial nuance, and attention to jewellery and hairstyle, that can be compared with the treatment of the young man’s head in our drawing. Vignali, like his pupil Dolci, was particularly adept at balancing the cool graduations of black chalk hatching with the bold red-orange Florentine chalk of baroque Tuscan draughtsmanship, often subtly enmeshing the two tones of hatching to model and shadow the soft areas of the face and neck.
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1 Ketterer Kunst, Hamburg, 28 October 2006, lot 411.
2 Letter, dated ....2006.
3 Head of a young woman, wearing a coral necklace, red and black chalk, 324 x 224 mm., Sotheby’s, London, 5 July 2000, lot 11.
4 J. Byam Shaw, Italian Drawings in the Lugt Collection, Paris, 1983, p. 71, no. 68, pl. 82 (Head of a young woman looking down to left
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