A Baptism with the Virgin and Child Crowned between Saint Peter and Saint Paul
16th century
15.8 cm x 9.8 cm (6 1/4 in. x 3 7/8 in.)
Andrea Boscoli
(Florence, Italy, circa 1560 – 1607)
Primary
Object Type:
drawing
Artist Nationality:
Europe, Italian
Medium and Support:
Recto: Pen and brown ink with brush and brown wash over red chalk on cream antique laid paper; Verso: bottom right corner, fragment of a study of two figures, pen and brown ink with brush and brown wash
Credit Line:
Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, The Suida-Manning Collection, 2017
Accession Number:
2017.928
An idiosyncratic late Mannerist, Boscoli was probably trained by the progressive Florentines of Venetian inspiration, but himself returned as an almost reactionary formalist, and repressed romantic, to the school’s first generation of Man-nerists, Pontormo and Rosso. His paintings and especially his drawings distill the styles of those artists to the threshold of geometric abstraction, but also compen-sate with an unusually coherent light and caricatural sentiment. This small study, characteristic in its visual strength and representational ambiguity, surely pre-pared the composition of an altarpiece.