P 1 : JZP
0521551335 int 1 a CUNY 160 /Joannides 052155 133 1 January 11 , 2007 9 : 33
THE DISPERSAL AND FORMATION OF SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE’S COLLECTION OF DRAWINGS 29So much for the drawings possessed for only a year
or two by Michelangelo’s unfortunate pupil. What other
groupings of Michelangelo drawings are likely to have
existed in the the sixteenth century? The recently discov-
ered inventory of a previously unknown collector, Anto-
nio Tronsarelli, who died in 1601 , lists three drawings
as by Michelangelo. Tronsarelli could well have acquired
these in Michelangelo’s lifetime, and it is likely that all
weregenuine: One of the three can be identified with
Cat. 17.^162
There is no evidence of any direct connection between
Michelangelo and Tronsarelli. There was, however, a very
direct link between Michelangelo and the man who
no doubt possessed a much more significant cache of
his drawings: Daniele da Volterra, Michelangelo’s closest
artist-friend in the last years of his life. Michelangelo made
some designs expressly for projects by Daniele during the
155 0s and early15 6 0s and may have given him a num-
ber of other drawings. Daniele probably owned the two
remarkable and famous black chalk drawings for theBattle
of Cascina,nowin Haarlem. He cited the figure of the sol-
dier fastening the armour of his comrade in his altarpiece
of theBaptism of Christin the Ricci Chapel in San Pietro
in Montorio, one of his last works.^163 However, although
Daniele clearly had close knowledge of Michelangelo’s
drawings (and, indeed, a copy by him of Michelangelo’s
Ganymedeis recorded but is not now identified), he did
not try to imitate him. Daniele produced highly finished
drawings for his compositions, which attain almost the
level of Michelangelo’s Presentation Drawings, but his
handling of the chalk is more systematic and regular than
Michelangelo’s. It seems likely, indeed, that the drawings
with which Michelangelo expressly provided him were
not highly finishedmodelli, such as he sometimes made for
Marcello Venusti, but rather sketches laying out a compo-
sition or determining a pose. Daniele was a draughtsman
of the very highest ability and would not have required
the same degree of assistance as Venusti, or even Sebas-
tiano. But even though Michelangelo’s influence under-
lay the dense mode of drawing practiced by a number
of Roman artists and visitors in the second half of the
century in Rome, it is difficult to chart precise knowl-
edge of his drawings among the major artists and some of
theMichelangelisti,Pellegrino Tibaldi for example, seem
to have derived as much from Daniele da Volterra and,
byexample rather than association, Francesco Salviati, as
from Michelangelo directly. And those artists who may
have made a study of some of Michelangelo’s drawings,
Annibale and Agostino Carracci, were probably attracted
more to his early pen drawings and those of the Sistine
period than to his late works. But this is hypothetical giventhat no Carracci copies after drawings by Michelangelo
have yet been identified. Nevertheless, drawings by all
these artists have at times been confused with those of
Michelangelo.
When Daniele died in15 6 6, only two years after
Michelangelo, his assistants Michele degli Alberti and
Feliciano di San Vito were, according to Vasari, be-
queathed all his artistic property. This presumably
included his own drawings as well as those that he pos-
sessed by other artists. Vasari does not mention Giacomo
Rocca, but Giacomo too seems to have been among
Daniele’s pupils and no doubt also obtained drawings.
Working together, Giacomo and Michele employed the
second black chalk study forCascinanow in Haarlem,
the famousRunning Figure,inreverse but at full length,
in a fresco of a Roman Triumph in the corner room of
the Palazzo dei Conservatori, datable15 6 8- 9. Although
this figure could have been known from other sources –
Salviati was aware of it too, and included a half-length
derivation from it in his fresco of theDefeat of Saulin
Palazzo Sacchetti in the early155 0s–itislikely that
the link was direct. It is not known when Giacomo and
Michele began to work separately, but it is a fair assump-
tion that they at some point parted company and, pre-
sumably, then divided their inheritance.
There are a few clues that point to drawings by
Michelangelo that Rocca might have owned. Michelan-
gelo’s pen study of aSeated Woman(Cat. 22 ), made for
an unknown purpose, was surely in Rocca’s possession
because he employed it in two frescoes executed for the
Cevoli family: in reverse for the Samian Sibyl in the gallery
of Palazzo Sacchetti and, in the true sense, as an uniden-
tified Sibyl in the Cevoli chapel in Santa Maria degli
Angeli. The gallery, incidentally, also includes a scene
based on the upper group in Michelangelo’sBrazen Ser-
pentdrawing (Cat. 34 ), which Rocca might also have
owned.
The sequence Daniele da Volterra–Giacomo Rocca
can perhaps be extended. Baglione records that as a young
man, Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavaliere d’Arpino, worked
with Rocca, and specifically remarks that Cesari admired
the Michelangelo drawings then in Rocca’s possession.^164
Since Baglione knew Cesari, there is every reason to
believe this to be accurate. It seems likely that Cesari
eventually acquired a portion of Giacomo Rocca’s col-
lection of drawings for himself: According to Baglione,
Rocca died during the pontificate of Clement VIII, that
is between15 9 2and 1605.
The Cavaliere himself died in 1640 ,and although the
immediate fate of his collection is not known, Bottari,
in a note to the life of Michelangelo in the third volume