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Lot Essay
Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774), the first recorded owner of these drawings, as well as of four others at the Louvre and one at the Musée Bonnat, Bayonne (Lohse Belkin, op. cit., I, nos. 77-81), proposed that they were the work of Rubens after woodcuts by Hans Burgkmair (1473-1531). All seven drawings indeed copy illustrations taken from the 1532 German edition of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae, published in Augsburg under the title Von der Artzney bayder Glück. Attributed to Burgkmair in Mariette’s day, the woodcuts are now given to another hand known as the Petrarch Master, sometimes identified with Hans Weiditz (1495-1537). The woodcut illustrations upon which the present drawings are based can be found in the first volume of the book, fol. F ii recto and D iii recto, respectively. Rubens copied the first of these prints in a drawing now at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam (Lohse Belkin, op. cit., I, no. 74, II, fig. 199).
Mariette’s attribution to Rubens went unchallenged until 1959 when Julius Held suggested that they could be ‘early attempts’ of Antoine Sallaert (1580-1650) (Rubens. Selected drawings, London 1959, I, p. 54, nt 1). There are indeed similarities with this artist’s drawings and prints in hatching and rendering of faces (see for instance his etching, Hollstein 1), but usually Sallaert’s style is heavier and more mannered. The style of Jan Boeckhorst (1604-1668), to whom Anne-Marie Logan proposed to attribute the drawings (‘Jan Boeckhorst als Zeichner’, in Jan Boeckhorst, 1604-1668. Maler der Rubenszeit, exh. cat., Antwerp, Rubenshuis, and Münster, Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Münster, 1990, p. 121), is more fluent, and this attribution has recently been rejected (M. Galen, Johann Boeckhorst, Gemälde und Zeichnungen, Hamburg, 2012, p. 462, under nos. AZ 38-AZ 41). For now, the author of these spirited and refined copies must remain unknown, but there can be little doubt he was a Fleming familiar with Rubens’s youthful habit of copying German prints.
Mariette’s attribution to Rubens went unchallenged until 1959 when Julius Held suggested that they could be ‘early attempts’ of Antoine Sallaert (1580-1650) (Rubens. Selected drawings, London 1959, I, p. 54, nt 1). There are indeed similarities with this artist’s drawings and prints in hatching and rendering of faces (see for instance his etching, Hollstein 1), but usually Sallaert’s style is heavier and more mannered. The style of Jan Boeckhorst (1604-1668), to whom Anne-Marie Logan proposed to attribute the drawings (‘Jan Boeckhorst als Zeichner’, in Jan Boeckhorst, 1604-1668. Maler der Rubenszeit, exh. cat., Antwerp, Rubenshuis, and Münster, Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Münster, 1990, p. 121), is more fluent, and this attribution has recently been rejected (M. Galen, Johann Boeckhorst, Gemälde und Zeichnungen, Hamburg, 2012, p. 462, under nos. AZ 38-AZ 41). For now, the author of these spirited and refined copies must remain unknown, but there can be little doubt he was a Fleming familiar with Rubens’s youthful habit of copying German prints.