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STEFANO DELLA BELLA (Florence 1610-1664)
A Costume design for a Moorish Character, half-length |
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Black chalk, grey and pink washes
179 x 129 mm.
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Provenance:
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Charles Rogers, London; by descent to his brother-in-law,
William Cotton, Leatherhead, Surrey
Henry Scipio Reitlinger, London (Lugt 2274a), his mark on the old backing sheet, his sale, Sotheby's London, 9 December 1953, lot 28 (one of a pair), when purchased by
Hans Calmann, London.
With P. & D. Colnaghi.
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Literature:
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| Anthony Blunt, The Drawings of G. B. Castiglione & Stefano della Bella in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1954, p. 95, under no. 31. |
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This drawing was probably originally intended as a costume design for one of the various pageants, masquerades and ballets of the Medici Court, particularly those organised the Accademia degli Immobili, under the patronage of Cardinal Carlo de' Medici. It is interesting to note that, in each of the productions of the Accademia, a part was written for the Cardinal's Moorish servant. Indeed, among a large group of full-length costume studies by Della Bella in the British Museum - from the same period and in the same technique as the drawing here exhibited - is a study of a costumed moor, possibly the same model.1Five similar bust-length studies of female moors wearing elaborate headdresses, also drawn with pale washes of colour, are in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.2 Other examples, in pen and ink, are in the Instituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome.3 There is another drawing, pendant to the present sheet, of a Moor wearing an elaborate headdress, bust-length and turned to the left, which is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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1 P. D. Massar, Costume Drawings by Stefano della Bella
for the Florentine Theater, in Master Drawings, 1970, Vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 249 and
259, p. 11.
2 Anthony Blunt, op.cit., p.95, nos.27-31, plates 8-10.
3 Maria Catelli Isola, Disegni di Stefano della Bella dalle collezioni
del Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, exhib. cat., Rome, 1976,
p.33, nos. 60 and 61.
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