Lot 14: u - *Domenico Beccafumi1486-1551

Oil on paper laid down on board. This lot contains 1 item(s). Oil sketches by Beccafumi are very rare and seldom appear on the market. Although this study of a bearded man, seen in profile with a white collar, does not seem to relate to any known work by the artist, the general technique as well as the quick and broad touches of paint which animate this portrait are entirely characteristic of his style. To note a specific detail, the same touch of red paint over the broadly painted ear appears in two other bozzetti of heads. One of these, connected with a painting of the mid 1530s, is in the Uffizi (see Domenico Beccafumi e il suo Tempo, exh.cat., Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, 1990, cat.127). The other is a very painterly study, sold London, Sotheby's, 5 July 1976, lot 11, which Donato Sanminiatelli relates to the head of a young man in the left foreground of Beccafumi's fresco, The Reconciliation between Aemilius Laepidus and Fulvius Flaccus, painted in 1529-1535 for the Sala del Concistorio in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (see D. Sanminiatelli, 'The sketches of Domenico Beccafumi', The Burlington Magazine, vol.XCVII, February 1955, p.39, fig.8).