After the antique

Speranza

“After the Antique” like “Allegorical Subject” have to be among the most useful titles.

Right up there with the 20th century favourite “Untitled.”

The drawing by the Danish artist Melchior Lorck shows a group of draped figures (“draped figure” is also terrifically generic and useful).

 Lorck drew it in 1552, the year he visited Roma.

The figures are fragmentary, all are headless and many have lost their arms, making them more difficult to identify.

The Muse Melpomene at the center of the drawing holds a theatrical mask and as a consequence is much easier to recognize than the others. Since the mask is part of the main shaft, and not an extremity, it has survived. Often, people who study classical art are good at identifying figures even if they are without heads and attributes. The stance, and dress tell a lot.

Melchior Lorck (1526/27-after 1583) | Eighteen Studies after the Antique | Pen and gray-brown ink, brush and wash | 266 x 190 mm | Statens Museum for Kunst | Copenhagen

The table below has some electronic resources for studying ancient sculpture and drawings (documents as they’re called by scholars of the antique).

Bibliotheca Hertziana	Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome	Digital library to digitized books to Antike Kunst. Works by Pietro Santo Bartoli, Domenico Augusto Bracci. Adding
Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance	Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften	Combined with corpus of ancient art known in the Middle Ages and Winkelmann, Corpus
Monumenta Rariora: La fortuna della statuaria antica	Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa	Giovan Battista Cavalieri, Girolamo Franzini, Lorenzo and Andrea Vaccaro, François Perrier, Paolo Alessandro Maffei, and Dominic Magnan
Musei Capitolini, Rome	Musei Capitolini, Rome	25,000 images and adding
Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae	Univ. of Chicago	Publisher Antonio Lafreri's 1570s engravings after Roman art and architecture. +1,000 prints

 

Often draftsman would not be copying any specific work, but instead found broad inspiration in the antique. “All’antica” is what it’s called and the danger is that one could be looking for a sculpture that never existed in the first place.

Drawings Collections and Digital Search Forms

The table below lists drawings collections that can be searched online. By clicking on the collection name, you will be brought to their search forms.

The most useful of the sites are of the Louvre, Joconde (French state museums), and the British Museum.

This table will be updated, not in this post, but at a page dedicated to web resources (left side of home page and called Resources and Links). The Tate has a number of interesting pages about the intricacies of putting their collection online and the initial page can be found here.

Collection	Country	City/Loc.	No. of Drawings	No. of Drawings Online
Accademia Carrara, Ambrosiana, Brera, Poldi Pezzoli, and other Lombard Collections	Italy	Lombardy Region		3,223	Site of the Beni Culturali, Lombardy
Albertina, Grafische Sammlung	Austria	Vienna	50,000		5,000 prints and drawings online. Drawings not broken out.
Ambrosiana, Biblioteca	Italy	Milan	12,000	8,315
Art Institute of Chicago	USA	Chicago	11,500	6,797
Ashmolean Museum - Oxford Univ.	UK	Oxford		5,090
Basel Kunstmuseum	Switzerland	Basel			300,000 prints, drawings, and watercolors. 2513 online
Biblioteca Nacional	Spain	Madrid	45,000
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery	UK	Birmingham	1600		Pre-Raphaelite
Bologna – Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe	Italy	Bologna	9,000	192
Boston Museum of Fine Arts	USA	Boston		712

Catalog Entries and Databases

If we were collecting drawings centuries ago, at least in Italy, we would probably have assembled our drawings as Padre Sebastiano Resta (1653 – 1714) had–using albums and writing pertinent information right by the drawings.

A major drawback of keeping drawings in albums, or laid down on mounts, is that a good many drawings are double-sided and by pasting drawings down, you lose one side.

Discovering that you have another drawing on the verso of a laid down drawing is similar to the thrill of discovering that there are two layers to the chocolate box.

Padre Sebastiano Resta | Libro d'Arabeschi | Album of Drawings | Biblioteca Comunale | Palermo

Most people now keep their drawings in mats and information is stored apart.

FileMaker Pro and Access are two databases that can be used for storing this type of information. Since I’m always worried about losing information, whether by corrupted programs or computer failure, it would be wonderful if one could use Google docs to keep all the information together, both fields and images.
This would be useful for accessing information from computers at libraries and anywhere.

The following is a list of possible fields for catalog entries or fact sheets.

• Creation Place
• School
• Century
• Artist’s Name
• Birth Place
• Birth Date
• Death Date
• Death Place
• Image Recto
• Title Recto
• Date of Work
• Media Recto
• Insciption Recto
• Image Verso
• Title Verso
• Date of Work
• Media Verso
• Inscription Verso
• Carrier/Drawing Support
• Size in Millimeters/Inches
• Watermark Image
• Watermark Reference
• Inventory Number
• Acquired from
• Date
• Price
• Provenance
• Lugt Image
• Lugt Number
• Exhibitions
• Bibliography – Real
• Bibliography – Related
• Notes/Correspondence