Lot 30: Giulio Pippi, called Giulio Romano , Rome 1499 - 1546 Mantua david observing bathsheba bathing Pen and brown ink and wash, over slight traces of black chalk; bears old attribution, in pen and brown ink, twice: Julio Romano

Pen and brown ink and wash, over slight traces of black chalk; bears old attribution, in pen and brown ink, twice: Julio Romano

measurements note 365 by 281mm

Mantua, Palazzo Te, Perino del Vaga, 2001, no. 5, reproduced

Handbook of the International Fine Art Fair, New York, The Armory, May 1996, reproduced p. 47

With Galerie de Bayser, Paris; acquired in 1997

This is Giulio's design for an octagonal fresco in the vault of the Loggia of the Palazzo Te in Mantua, which is decorated with stories from the life of King David.υ1 The Loggia was never completed with the statues that were originally planned for it, and has suffered from the effects of the elements. A document records that the two scenes of Bathsheba at her Toilet and Bathsheba Bathing were painted not by Giulio himself, but by Rinaldo Mantovano, between 21 April and 25 November 1531.υ2 Linda Wolk-Simon, in her entry in the Perino del Vaga exhibition catalogue, describes this sheet as characteristic of the style of drawings which Giulio made for his assistants to use in the execution of the paintings and stucchi at the Palazzo Te.

There is an etching of this composition, in reverse and octagonal in form, by Jean-Baptiste Corneille.υ3
1. F. Hartt, Giulio Romano, New Haven 1958, vol. II, fig. 335 2. Hartt, op. cit., vol. I, p. 150 3. See S. Massari, Giulio Romano pinxit et delineavit, Rome 1993, p. 293, no. 285, reproduced