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Last updated: 6/23/2019
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Old Master Drawings: Jacopo Palma il Giovane (Venice, 1548-1628)

North Italian Illuminated Manuscript / Italian Old Master Drawings: An Overview / Italian School, 16th-Century Drawings
Michelangelo Buonarotti (After) / Raphael / Giulio Romano / Perino del Vaga / Marcantonio Raimondi / Parmigianino
Titian (after) / Andrea Schiavone / Tintoretto / Veronese / Taddeo Zuccaro / Federico Zuccaro / Alessandro Casolani
Jacopo Palma il Giovane / Cherubino Alberti / Luca Cambiaso / Annibale Carracci / Ludovico Carracci

Italian School, 17th-Century Drawings / Bolognese School / Giovanni Baglione / Matteo Rosselli / Ercole Bazzicaluva
Baldassare Franceschini called Il Volterrano / Pier Francesco Mazzuccelli, il Morazzone / Odoardo Fialetti / Simone Cantarini
Domenichino / Francesco Albani / Giovanni Lanfranco / Guercino / Pier Francesco Mola / Antonio Busca

Italian School Printmakers, 15th-17th Centuries: Venetian School, c. 1497 / Raphael School / Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio
Marcantonio Raimondi / The Master of the Die / Anea Vico / Agostino Veneziano / Nicholas Beatrizet
Michelangelo Buonarotti (After) / Giulio Bonasone / Giovanni Battista Franco /Girolamo Fagiuoli / Cherubino Alberti
Titian (after) / Tintoretto (after) / Parmigianino / Giorgio Ghisi / Diana Scultori / Annibale Carracci / Ludovico Carracci
Agostino Carracci / Simone Cantarini / Elisabetta Sirani / Gerolamo Scarsello

Netherlandish School, 15th-17th-Century Drawings / Flemish School, 17th-Century
Bernaert van Orley / Lucas van Leyden / Maarten de Vos / Jan Baptiste de Wael / Abraham Bloemaert
Peter Paul Rubens / Philipp Sadeler / Nicolaes Maes / Rembrandt School

Netherlandish Printmakers 16th-17th Centuries: Lucas van Leyden, Maarten van Heemskerck, Cornelis Cort
Philips Galle, Abraham de Bruyn, Hans (Jan) Collaert, Adriaen Collaert, Karel de Mallery, Theodore Galle, Hendrik Goltzius
Julius Goltzius, Jacob Matham, Jan Sanraedam, Maarten de Vos, Jan Sadeler, Aegidius Sadeler, Raphael Sadeler
Crispin de Passe, Magdalena de Passe, Wierix Brothers, Rembrandt, Rembrandt School, Jan Lievens, Jan Joris van Vliet,
Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck
German Drawings: Hans Sebald Beham / Virgil Solis / Hans von Aachen / Joseph Heinrich Roos
German 16th century printmakers: Heinrich Aldegrever, Jost Amman, Hans Sebald Beham, Hans Brosamer, Hans Burgkmair,
Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Durer, Albrecht Durer (After), Hans Holbein (After), Hopfer Brothers, Georg Pencz, Hans Schäufelein,
Virgil Solis, Wolfgang Stuber

French Drawings: Charles de La Fosse / Etienne Parrocel / François Boucher / Jean-François de Neufforge / Mouricault
French printmakers: Etienne Delaunne / Rene Boyvin /Thomas de Leu / Jean Cousin the Younger / Jacques Callot
Abraham Bosse / Sebastien Bourdon / Claude Gelle "le Lorraine" / Jean LePautre
Claudine Bouzonnet Stella / Antonette Bouzonnet Stella / Gabriel Perelle

19th-Century Drawings / 20th-Century Drawings
As Philip Rylands notes in his article on Palma in the Grove Dictionary of Art, "his vast output represents the impact of central Italian Mannerism but principally of Jacopo Tintoretto on Venetian painting on the generation after Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese" (23: 878). Rylands describes him as "a greater artist than his father" and suggests that he was "virtually self-taught, apart from a presumed acquaintance with his father's workshop." He was supported by the Duke of Urbino for four years, who sent him to Rome (until c. 1573-74) for study and where Taddeo and Federico Zuccaro influenced his drawing style. His Roman years also prepared him to appreciate Tintoretto's style upon his return to Venice and to mix a certain amount of naturalism with the prevailing Venetian Mannerism. He began getting major public commissions c. 1578-79 and after Tintoretto's death in 1594, he became the most esteemed artist in Venice which seemed to inspire him to a certain extent keep the glories of Tintoretto's style alive in his own works. The catalogue of his surviving paintings includes over 600 works, including works commissioned by patrons outside of Venice such as the Emperor Rudolph II and King Sigismund III of Poland. Rylands praises him as a "draftsman of great facility" and notes his involvement in the preparation and publication of two books on the art of drawing (Venice 1608 and 1611), the earliest to be published in Italy.

As James Byam Shaw put it in his essay on "Drawing in Venice" in The Genius of Venice 1500-1600, ed. Jane Martineau and Charles Hope (NY: Abrams, 1984), Palma's drawings capture the essence of Tintoretto's energy and fluidity as well as the rhythms and grace of Veronese's: "Occasionally Tintoretto may have studied a static living model; but much more often his drawings are of struggling distorted figures in violent action. . . . More detailed studies might have been more useful to himself and to his pupils in carrying out their great works; but above all the tempo of violence had to be maintained. . . . Apart from Tintoretto's own family, and certainly more important than any of them, Palma Giovane . . . in his early figure studies comes near to the Tintorettos in style and character" (p. 244). But Palma, though he sometimes imitated Tintoretto, who only used chalk or charcoal in quick hasty sketches, also used "pen and pale wash to great effect, imitating the method of free sketch practised so brilliantly by Paolo Veronese, who was nearer to him in age. Palma's earlier drawings in this medium have often been mistaken for Paolo's; though in the latter part of his long life, in the early decades of the seventeen century, Palma's handling of the pen became looser, his line more broken, his forms more mannered, and the influence of Paolo is less obvious" (p. 244).

Selected Bibliography: Anna Forlani, Mostra di disegni di Jacopo Palma il Giovane (Florence: Uffizi, 1958); S. Mason Rinbaldi, Palma il Giovanni: Opera Completa (Milan, 1984); S. Mason Rinbaldi, Palma il Giovanni 1548-1628: Disegni e dipinti (Milan: Electa, 1990); David Rosand, Palma Giovanni and Venetian Modernism (diss, Ann Arbor, 1967); David Rosand, "The Crisis of the Venetian Renaissance Tradition," L'Arte, xi-xii (1970), 5-63; David Rosand, "Palma Giovanni as Draughtstman," Master Drawings, 8: ii (1970), 148-61.
These two drawings are based upon an engraving by Aegidius Sadeler after Jacopo Palma il Giovane (Venice, 1548-1628), Torturer. Red chalk on heavy cream laid paper, c. 1580. A man, is tugging on a rope in his right hand, apparently increasing the tension. In the accompanying drawing, we see that the object of the tightening is St. Sebastian, tied to a tree and bound by the same rope. The drawing itself has been attributed to Annibale Carracci. Image size: 208x138mm. Sold only as a pair: Please call or email for current pricing information.
These two drawings are based upon an engraving by Aegidius Sadeler after Jacopo Palma il Giovane (Venice, 1548-1628), St. Sebastian. Red chalk on heavy cream laid paper, c. 1580. In this drawing, we see St. Sebastian, bound by the same rope the torturer was using. The drawing itself has been attributed to Annibale Carracci. Image size: 208x132mm. Sold only as a pair: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Palma tackled the subject of St. Sebastian on a number of occasions. In Palma il Giovanni 1548-1628: Disegni e dipinti, S. Mason Rinbaldi reproduces eight drawings (figures 12a, 13a, 15b, 15c, 16a, 16b, 16c, 21, and 30) from c. 1608-1611. All of these are done in pen and brown ink and wash. An engraving by Aegidius Sadeler (The Illustrated Bartsch, volume 72, part 1, n. 96) shows a Sebastian in a posture almost identical to ours, though rather than grimacing he is looking up, where an angel is flying towards his upraised hand holding a martyr's crown and a palm. Two men are tying him to the tree; the one on the left is clearly the model for the one in our drawing, here pushing against the tree, his head and hands at at the level of the Saint's thigh. The editor's commentary notes that the engraving (see photo below) is "After a drawing by Jacopo Palma formerly in the Woerner collection, sold by Houthakker. The print has been compared to the painting in the Duomo of Castelfranco" (TIB 7201: 096, p. 158). Since Aegidius Sadeler was not born until 1570, I assume that Palma's drawing is earlier than the print and date it tentatively by stylistic comparisons. On the other hand, it is quite possible that our two drawings are studies made after either Palma's drawing or more likely Sadeler's engraving by a later artist (and Annibale Carracci comes to mind because of the fluent use of red chalk); in that case, a date during the 1590s or after becomes likely.
These two drawings are based upon an engraving by Aegidius Sadeler after Jacopo Palma il Giovane (Venice, 1548-1628), St. Sebastian. Red chalk on heavy cream laid paper, c. 1580. In this drawing, we see St. Sebastian, grimacing, bound by the same rope the executioner was using. The drawing itself has been attributed to Annibale Carracci. Image size: 208x132mm. Sold only as a pair: Please call or email for current pricing information.
These two drawings are based upon an engraving by Aegidius Sadeler after Jacopo Palma il Giovane (Venice, 1548-1628), Executioner. Red chalk on heavy cream laid paper, c. 1580. A man, is tugging on a rope in his right hand, apparently binding someone. In the accompanying drawing, we see St. Sebastian, tied to a tree and bound by the same rope. The drawing itself has been attributed to Annibale Carracci. Image size: 208x138mm. Sold only as a pair: Please call or email for current pricing information.

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