Lot 48: Giulio Benso , Pieve del Tecco 1601 - 1668 the assumption of the virgin, with two bishops and other figures Pen and brown ink and wash over traces of black chalk; triangular shape; bears various inscriptions in several hands and numbering top center:

Pen and brown ink and wash over traces of black chalk; triangular shape; bears various inscriptions in several hands and numbering top center: 204; Palma Giovane/...jacop. o /il Vecchio ; sessanta; Benzo Genovese and several others cut

measurements note 331 by 490mm

With Galerie de Bayser, Paris; acquired in 1995

As an adolescent, Benso left his native town and came to Genoa, where he made such a strong impression on Giovanni Carlo Doria, the city's most important patron, that he entered the workshop of Giovanni Battista Paggi, the leading artist of the early seventeenth-century Genoese school. Consequently, the young Benso came to be influenced by numerous artists, not only Paggi and his master, Luca Cambiaso, but also Vouet and Procaccini, who were in Genoa at the end of the second decade. Benso painted the subject of the Assumption many times. The frequency with which the theme occurs in his work may be due to the fact that in 1637 the Genoese Senate declared the Virgin the patron saint of Genoa and its republic. Both the artist's fame and that of the subject were not, however, confined to the city: in 1644 Benso painted the same subject for the Schottenkirche in Vienna.υ1 The present representation replaces the Apostles who witnessed the event with two kneeling bishops, one of whom may be St. Ambrose. Stylistically, the Horvitz drawing can be compared to a sheet depicting Christ and the Adulterous Woman, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.υ2 In both drawings, we see the same monumental figures, but combined with free, expressive pen-work and a lightness in the use of wash which seems particularly sensitive for the artist. 1. M. Newcome, Genoese Baroque Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Binghampton, New York, University Art Gallery, 1972, p. 19 2. See C. Bambach and N.M. Orenstein, Genoa, Drawings and Prints 1530-1800, exhibition catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996, p. 14, cat. no. 2