Old Master Drawings at Chazen Museum

Saturday, 23 July 2005 11:46

MADISON, WI.-The Chazen Museum of Art presents Old Master Drawings from the Permanent Collection. This exhibition draws on the museum’s small but choice collection of drawings by artists from Italy, the Netherlands, France, and England made during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Drawings are fascinating first glimpses of an artist’s inspiration and occasionally a record of revised thinking about a subject. These drawings are mostly preparatory studies for paintings, frescoes, or murals, or in some cases, architectural drawings for buildings. For these explorations artists used red chalk, black chalk, pen and ink, sometimes adding color highlights. The subjects are typical for two-dimensional art of the era: mythological scenes, religious or secular narratives, portraiture, landscapes. The painter and author Giorgio Vasari (Italian, 1511–1574) wrote in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (second edition, 1568): “One can conclude that drawing is none other than a visible expression and declaration of the concept which one has in the spirit and of that which one has imagined in the mind and built in thought.” Drawings allow the viewer to see the creative process in all its stages and media. The subject matter—sometimes obscure to the modern viewer—reveals worlds that have inspired artistic output for centuries: religion, mythology, the description of nature, the observation of human form and emotion. Some drawings included in the exhibition were preparatory studies for finished paintings (Giulio Romano), others served as templates for engravings or etchings (Oudry). Others were prepared as models for large-scale architectural projects (Bibiena). The Chazen drawing by the Cavaliere d’Arpino is an important recent addition to the museum’s holdings of Italian drawings, sixteen of which date from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Notable among these are works attributed to contemporaries of Cesari such as Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (1610–1662), who was also active in Rome, and two works by the leading Bolognese painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino (1591–1666). Eighteenth-century Italian drawings include two characteristically light-filled works by the Venetian painter and draftsman Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Tiepolo. French drawings of the eighteenth century are represented in the Chazen collection by splendid sheets by Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686–1755), Nicholas Lancret (1690–1743), Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), and Jacques-Louis David’s Roman Curule Chair, ca. 1775–1780,

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