Lot 109: PIETRO FACCINI BOLOGNA CIRCA 1562 - 1602 THE MADONNA IN GLORY WITH THE PATRON SAINTS OF BOLOGNA:

PIETRO FACCINI BOLOGNA CIRCA 1562 - 1602 THE MADONNA IN GLORY WITH THE PATRON SAINTS OF BOLOGNA: SS. PETRONIUS, DOMINIC, PROCULUS AND FRANCIS

pen and black ink and grey wash

CATALOGUE NOTE

This is a very important addition to a small group of drawings by Faccini for an unidentified work with this composition. We are grateful to Nicholas Turner for pointing out the link with the related sheets. It is possible that these drawings are for an unrealized altarpiece, or one that was, as Catherine Johnston put it, 'so transformed in its final state as not to be immediately obvious' (see Mimi Cazort and Catherine Johnston, Bolognese Drawings in North American Collection, Ottawa 1982, p. 74, under cat. no. 34).

It is, however, clear that this commission must have been an important one, both from the number of surviving drawings and from the fact that the composition included the city of Bologna, the model of which appears in the centre, and its patron Saints. There are four further known compositional studies: one in the Louvre (inv. 7918 ), one in Ottawa, one in the Uffizi, and one in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon, which is worked up with coloured washes (see Cazort and Johnston, op. cit., p. 74, cat. no. 34, reproduced, and Catherine Johnston, Il seicento e il setteccento a bologna, Milan 1971, p. 85, pl. XXIV). It is also worth noting that the present composition is in fact quite close to Faccini's altarpiece The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, now in Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande, in Bologna, an impressive early work of the mid-1580s (see Emilio Negro and Nicosetta Roio, Pietro Faccini, Modena 1997, pp. 84-5, cat. no. 7, reproduced).

332 by 234mm