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26 THE DRAWINGS OF MICHELANGELO AND HIS FOLLOWERS IN THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUMThe drawings given to Gherardo Perini, as mentioned
earlier, joined the Florentine Grand Ducal Collections.
Some other Presentation Drawings, whose recipients are
not known, probably ended up either in aristocratic col-
lections or, by unknown paths, in Casa Buonarroti. Still
others were probably retained by the families of the indi-
viduals for whom they were made: Michelangelo’s great
portrait of his young friend Andrea Quaratesi (151 2– 85 ),
to whom he had given drawing lessons in the15 2 0s
(W 59 ), was still in the possession of Andrea’s descendants
in the mid-seventeenth century.
Apart from these highly finished display pieces, other
drawings – lost, stolen, or strayed from Michelangelo’s
studio – and sketches given to artist friends would cer-
tainly have circulated.15 2Individual sheets are difficult to
trace in the absence of lucky evidential finds, but it does
seem that before the end of the sixteenth century there
existed several major caches of drawings by Michelangelo,
and a number of minor ones, which had never been in
Casa Buonarroti.^153
Undoubtedly the most substantial cache was formed
in Michelangelo’s own lifetime, by gift. When his pupil
Antonio Mini (15 0 6– 33 / 34 ) decided to seek his fortune
in France in 1532 , Michelangelo gave him his painting of
Ledaand, according to Vasari, two boxes of models and
drawings. Mini died early, and even though some of the
cartoons that he had received from Michelangelo were
later returned to the master, and presumably later still
destroyed by him, there is no written record as to what
happened to the models or the drawings. But there is a
certain amount of visual evidence that suggests an answer.
Starting in the153 0s and continuing through until the
15 7 0s, a number of drawings and paintings by Primatic-
cio and artists closely associated with him contain figures
copied from Michelangelo drawings. There can be no
doubt about this: The figures concerned are not found in
Michelangelo’s more public works. The borrowings are
often subtle and cunning, but once identified, they are
seen to be exact: In some cases the borrowed figures in
Primaticcio’s drawings are the same sizes as the figures in
the drawings by Michelangelo that they are copied from.
In every case except one, the originals of the drawings
referred to by Primaticcio have their starting provenance
in France, and in every case the original by Michelan-
gelo was drawn before 1531 :Itwould seem difficult to
deny that these drawings represent parts of Mini’s cache,
and it is probable that nearly all drawings by Michelan-
gelo datable before 1531 that have a starting provenance
in France (i.e., much of Jabach’s collection and that of
Crozat) came from Michelangelo’s gift to his pupil. At
least one has found its way to the Ashmolean Museum:One of the figures on Cat. 18 recto was copied by Pri-
maticcio. And it is probable that Cat. 59 ,which contains,
among other copies, some after a drawing in the British
Museum (W 4 /Corpus 48 ) that was certainly in France,
was also made there. None of these drawings, of course,
was known to Commodi.
Because Primaticcio had such immediate access to
these originals, it is a reasonable presumption that he
owned them, probably acquiring them soon after Mini’s
death. It was the group of drawings putatively owned
byPrimaticcio that probably provided the main source
of the great runs of Michelangelo’s drawings formed by
the fraternal collectors Israel and Christophe Desneux ̈
(and which largely passed to their nephew Franc ̧oisde la
Noue), who are said to have acquired their drawings from ̈
the Fontainebleau workshops.15 4It was from delaNou ̈e,
according to Mariette, that they were in turn acquired
byJabach, probably not directly but after Franc ̧ois de
la Noue’s death in ̈ 1656 , and perhaps in more than one
batch.^155 Certainly, Jabach bought widely and from many
sources, but, with certain exceptions, it is likely that most
of his Michelangelo drawings were acquired in France.
One of these exceptions might have been the Michelan-
gelo drawings that had been owned by Sir Peter Paul
Rubens, whose collection was acquired en bloc at his
posthumous sale of 1657 byCanon Jan Philip Happart.
Happart seems to have sold drawings to Jabach in the
1660 s, and some Michelangelos may have been among
them. However, Happart still owned twelve drawings
attributed to Michelangelo at his death in 1686 , and if
these included the four bearing the initials of Rubens
that are now in the Albertina, then they were presum-
ably acquired in 1686 or later by a French collector, given
that their earliest certain provenance is Crozat.15 6 It is
not inconceivable that they too passed through Jabach’s
hands.
The four Michelangelo drawings with the initials of
Rubens are all of spectacular beauty. Three of these are
en-suite with drawings now in Haarlem, but they bear
neither theBona Rotiinscription nor Irregular Num-
bering (to be discussed later), and if they did belong to
that series, they must have been separated from it before
inscriptions or numbers were applied. On balance, how-
ever, it is more likely that the separation occurred within
Michelangelo’s lifetime. One of the drawings owned by
Rubens, Michelangelo’s pen study of a standing nude
from the rear (BK 118 /Corpus 22 )was known in France
around15 7 0 when it was copied inLa Natationone of
the drawings of theSuite d’Artemise, and it is marginally
more probable that Rubens purchased the four Michelan-
gelos – and perhaps others – in Paris in the 1620 s than