Italian Renaissance Drawings at the Fondation Custodia

The Fondation Custodia is exhibiting drawings from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen: 120 masterpieces in a variety of styles and techniques, showing the medium’s essential role in the creative process from the 15th century onwards.

While there are plenty of fine drawings in France’s public collections, there are only a few opportunities to see them, given their fragility: at the Salon du Dessin, in the graphic art departments of various museums and at the Fondation Custodia in Paris. The current exhibition at the latter sheds considerable light on drawing’s fundamental role in the Italian Renaissance, while providing a chance to admire selected works from the outstanding collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Frits Lugt created the Fondation Custodia in 1947, exactly a century after the lawyer Frans Jacob Otto Boijmans made the initial bequest spawning the museum named after him in Rotterdam. Opened in 1849, in 1935 the museum welcomed the prolific collection of the German-born banker Franz Koenigs. With some 90,000 works, the Rotterdam museum’s graphic art collection is one of the largest in the world, and contains a remarkable group of Italian Renaissance drawings. Between 2018 and 2023, 380 of these Italian works from between 1400 and 1600 were studied and cataloged online as part of “The Paper Project” run by the Getty Foundation. And 120 of them have been selected for the Paris exhibition. According to Maud Guichané, head of collections at the Fondation Bemberg in Toulouse, and a former curator with the Fondation Custodia, these are “the most beautiful, the most remarkable and the most interesting drawings. Some of them recently turned out to be major discoveries, particularly in terms of attribution – to artists including Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Jacopo Pontormo, Pellegrino Tibaldi, Federico Zuccari and a few others. We have also ensured that the selection reflects the very nature of the Museum Boijmans collection and its strong points: namely the very early works, especially the drawings by Pisanello and the Gozzoli album, the incredible group of drawings by Fra Bartolomeo, 13 of which are on show, as well as works by other Florentine and Venetian artists, who are well represented in the collection.” She adds: “There are certain similarities between the Italian groups in these two collections, which were produced at the same time: a large majority of the drawings in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen come from the collection of Frits Lugt’s contemporary, the German banker Franz Koenigs. The two men knew each other well and even swapped drawings on several occasions!”

At the Heart of the Creative Process

The exhibition shows how drawing was practised in studios during the Renaissance. Books of motifs, which began to appear in the 14th century, were passed down from master to pupil over the generations. They were drawn in ink or metalpoint, sometimes coloured, and were executed on parchment until the mid-Quattrocento, as paper was very scarce and expensive. The Museum Boijmans has a very few examples, like the five pages from Pisanello’s broken-up travel sketchbook, and a book of models inherited from Gentile da Fabriano, to which he added copies of classical art and motifs drawn from life during his stay in Rome from 1431 to 1432. The drawing with four views of the same naked woman from behind, probably made during a bathing session, features the first profane nude in modern Western art. The meticulously rendered human body, the reference point and measure of all things (echoing the humanist thinking of the time), whether fragmented or in its entirety, was the main subject of Renaissance drawings, as witness the Franz Koenigs collection. Dated c.1450-1460, an album of 20-odd pages (bound in the 18th century using an old book of models from Benozzo Gozzoli’s studio) contains copies of antiquities, frescoes and plaster casts. Copying was an intrinsic part of young artists’ training in the Florentine studios of the Quattrocento. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were prolific draughtsmen who produced a wealth of works, taking drawing to its apogee at the dawn of the Cinquecento. Drawing then became disegno, i.e. the materialization of thought. For Leonardo, it was a means of exploring and understanding the world; for Michelangelo it was an expression of his inner self. Dated between 1505 and 1506, Leonardo’s study for Leda and the Swan – a work he never actually painted – is one of only two of his drawings now in Holland. The small, helmeted heads penned by Michelangelo in the same years show all the vigour and spontaneity of the artist described by his contemporaries as a “divine draughtsman”. Their followers and pupils, like those of Raphael – represented here by a small study of Saint John the Baptist for the Alba Madonna, painted in Rome in c.1510 – systematised the practice of drawing. Initial ideas were sketched out quickly on paper, then certain elements and the composition would be refined in studies. The whole work, fixed in a model, would finally be scaled up to the size of the final work in a cartoon.

From Florence to Venice

Acquired by Franz Koenigs in 1957, Fra Bartolomeo’s two albums, bound in c. 1730, contain some 400 drawings in black chalk and sanguine, the successive stages in the development of his religious compositions. With Jacopo Pontormo, Fra Bartolomeo embodied the Florentine bella maniera. “In his letter on the Paragone to Benedetto Varchi in 1547, Jacopo Pontormo stressed the importance of drawing as the foundation of all the arts,” says Cécile Beuzelin, a lecturer at the University of Montpellier. According to the specialist, the astonishing study of two seated boys, one of whom is picking his nose (c. 1525) bears witness to “Pontormo’s liking for these little scenes in everyday life, making him a precursor of the explorations of Carracci and Caravaggio. This drawing, which seems to have been sketched from life for the sheer pleasure of recording these everyday moments in the studio, is echoed in the small drawing of studio assistants singing, now in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts.” Particularly well represented in Franz Koenigs’ collection, the style of Cinquecento Venetian drawings arose from a specific practice very different from what was taught in the academies of Florence, Rome and Bologna. This type of drawing was full of colour and sensuality, and was practised in the family studios of the Serenissima: chalk drawings on coloured paper by the Bassanos, spirited studies in black chalk on blue paper by Jacopo Tintoretto and his sons, and ink and wash drawings by Paolo Veronese and members of his close circle. The latest works were produced in Rome, like a preparatory ink study, recently attributed to Federico Zuccari, for a full-length portrait of Polidoro da Caravaggio as the god Mars, which he painted in the Palazzo Zuccari in around 1595. From the outstanding French collections of Pierre Mignard, Pierre Crozat and Pierre-Jean Mariette, the man evoked in a few strokes of black chalk by Annibale Carracci in the same years is a sketch for the famous decoration of the vault of the Sala Grande in the Farnese Palace in Rome. The Renaissance was over; the Baroque and Classicism had now taken the stage.

Worth seeing
“Naissance et Renaissance du dessin italien. (The Birth and Renaissance of Italian Drawing.)
The collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen”
Fondation Custodia, Paris 75007
Until 12 January 2025
fondationcustodia.fr

Worth reading
“Italian Drawings 1400-1600”
boijmans.nl
“The Paper Project”
getty.edu