Lot 10: Giulio Clovio (Grisone 1498-1578 Rome)

Christ on the Cross
black chalk, watermark ladder in a cartouche (similar to Briquet 5930 [Lucca, 1560]), a patched hole below the right arm
14 3/4 x 9 5/8 in. (376 x 245 mm.)

Sir Peter Lely (L. 2092).
F. Asta (L. 116a).

One of a number of highly finished copies by Clovio after Michelangelo. The original drawing is now lost, but has been dated to the early 1540s by Professor Paul Joannides in his discussion of another version of the composition now in the Louvre (P. Joannides, Inventaire Général des Dessins Italiens, VI, Michel-Ange, élèves et copistes, Paris, 2003, no. 88). Clovio's inventory of 1577 records three drawings, perhaps including these two, in near identical terms as 'A Christ on the Cross, invention by Michelangelo, made by Don Giulio' (quoted in P. Joannides, op. cit., p. 235).
Clovio may have known Michelangelo when he was in Rome before the city was sacked in 1527, but they developed a much closer relationship after he returned to the service of Michelangelo's patron Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in 1540. He was an intimate of the intellectual circle around Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna, and the influence of the older artist's invention can be seen in many of his manuscript illuminations such as the Farnese Hours now in the British Library, London.
Finely drawn copies by Clovio after Michelangelo's studies of the Flagellation, of Venus, Vulcan and Cupid and of Tityus are in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (A.E. Popham and J. Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle, London, 1949, nos. 451, 454 and 459), while a copy after Ganymede is in the Louvre (P. Joannides, op. cit., no. 86).