Excerpted from Davis, Bruce. Master Drawings in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997, 25.
After Michelangelo, whose drawings he emulated, Bandinelli was the principal Florentine sculptor during the first half of the sixteenth century. After spending a number of years in Rome, he worked on such lucrative commissions in Florence as Hercules and Cacus in the Piazza della Signoria, the sculptures in the Sala dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio, and the high altar in the Duomo. His style was vilified, however, by his contemporaries and later critics (among them, Bernard Berenson).
Roger Ward has dated this vibrant and scintillating sheet to late in Bandinelli’s career, about 1550. He has related it to several other compositions of the Holy Family, noting that the familial intimacy of the subject is in Bandinelli’s oeuvre. Furthermore, the calligraphic pen line is much more fluid than is often found in Bandinelli’s drawings, in which the figures are shaded with more regular and systematic hatching. Other drawings by Bandinelli of the subject are found in the Uffizi.1The arrangement of the figures within a relatively shallow space suggested to Ward that the composition may have been intended for a sculptural relief. While no such work by Bandinelli is known, Ward has pointed out a possible relationship to a small sculpture of the Holy Family in the Victoria and Albert Museum with similar dimensions, attributed to Bandinelli’s pupil Pierino da Vinci.2
Notes
1. Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi: Inventario. Disegni di figura, 1 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1991), 230–34, nos. 542 f, 544 f, 547 f, 548 f, recto, 550 f, and 551 f.
2. John Pope-Hennessy, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1964), 2: 444; 3: fig. 469.
