ANONYMOUS (attributed to Nicolo DELLA CASA (active c. 1543-48) or Nicolas BÉATRIZET (1507/15 - c. 1565))
Price: 22 000 €
Baccio Bandinelli in his workshop - 1548
Engraving, 420 x 310 mm. Nagler 1, Le Blanc 1, Davis cat. no. 20.
Very fine impression printed on watermarked laid paper (three tulips in a circle surmounted by a six-pointed star (47 x 49 mm)). Good condition. A restored tear on the left edge of the image and a pale stain in the lower right corner; minor marginal soiling. Small margins all around the composition (sheet: 437 x 330 mm).
Provenance: former Félix Bouisset (1875-1960) collection, Montauban (handwritten note on old mounting).
"This engraving is the rarer and the lesser-known of two portraits of Bandinelli by Della Casa. Dated 1548, Portrait of Baccio Bandinelli depicts the Florentine sculptor with a younger appearance than in the other portrait of him in his studio." (Davis, cat. no. 20). The other portrait alluded to by Bruce Davis is of the sculptor, standing, mid-body, also surrounded by statuettes (see, for example, the impression in the Rijksmuseum). It is signed N.D.LA CASA F. These two engravings both reproduce self-portraits by Baccio Bandinelli.
The portrait of Baccio Bandinelli, dated 1548, bears no signature other than the edition mark A. S. Excudebat. While Bruce Davis attributes it to Nicolo della Casa, other attributions have also been put forward. Georg Kaspar Nagler and Charles Le Blanc consider it to be a work not only edited but also engraved by Antonio Salamanca. Erna Fiorentini and Raphael Rosenberg see it as the work of Nicolas Béatrizet. Adam Bartsch and Heinecken cite it as an anonymous piece.
The Saint Louis Art Museum (object number 205:2021) holds the only known impression of a reverse version of the Salamanca edition, unfinished and anonymous. Erna Fiorentini and Raphael Rosenberg believe it is by della Casa and may have served as a model for the author of the version dated 1548.
Regardless of the author (or authors) of the two engraved versions of this full-length portrait, Erna Fiorentini and Raphael Rosenberg note that it is "probably the most monumental engraved representations of a sixteenth-century artist" (Fiorentini and Rosenberg, p. 38). A rival of Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini, the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli was an important and controversial figure on the Florentine art scene in the mid-16th century. Giorgio Vasari dedicated one of his Lives to him in the second edition of 1568, but he already refers to the artist and his strong personality in the first edition, published in 1550. The various self-portraits of Baccio Bandinelli, drawn or engraved, bear witness to his efforts to promote himself widely. In the 1548 version, as in the one signed by Nicolo della Casa, Bandinelli poses proudly, surrounded by numerous statuettes and fragments of sculptures that also served as models for his pupils. Davis observes that he "Bandinelli is presented as a well-dressed gentleman rather than an artisan, an illustration of the sixteenth century’s elevation of the artist to the rank of an aristocratic and intellectual courtier." (Davis, cat. no. 20).
References: Bruce Davis, Mannerist Prints: International Style in the Sixteenth Century, 1988; Erna Fiorentini and Raphael Rosenberg, "Baccio Bandinelli's Self-portrait" in Print Quarterly 19, no. 1 (2002), pp. 34-44.