Spaightwood Galleries

As former teachers of Renaisssance literature, we found ourselves drawn to the prints and drawings of the period. This interest (tending at times to obsession), prompted our acquisition over the past ten years of a number of old master drawings, including works by Netherlandish artists like Bernaert van Orley, Maarten de Vos, Jan Baptiste de Wael, Abraham Bloemaert, Peter Paul Rubens, Philipp Sadeler, and Nicolaes Maes; we have also found works by Italian artists like Raphael, Parmigianino, Marcantonio Raimondi, Giulio Romano, Perino del Vaga, Andrea Schiavone, Veronese, Federico Zuccaro, Luca Cambiaso, Alessandro Casolani, Matteo Rosselli, Annibale Carracci, Domenichino, and Simone Cantarini, Francesco Albani, Guercino, Pier Francesco Mola, Francesco Vanni, Odoardo Fialetti, Ercole Bazzicaluva, Baldassare Franceschini, Giovanni Battista Vanni, Antonio Busca, Giovanni Lanfranco, Giuseppe Maria Cresspi; also in our collection are a growing number of works by German artists like Virgil Solis, Hans von Aachen, and Johann Heinrich Roos and French artists like Charles de la Fosse, Etienne Parrocel "Le Romain," François Boucher, Jean-François de Neufforge, and Mouricault. Some of these works appear to be finished drawings, others attempts to conceptualize an artistic problem to be solved, still others models for members of the master's workshop to execute in whole or in part under the master's supervision, and many are drawings of paintings, sculptures, etchings or engravings by their contemporaries of they works wished to study or use in their own works (including works after Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Palma Il Giovane, Agostino Carracci, Hendrik Goltzius, Rembrandt, among others). In addition to artists to whom we can authorship or attribute works, we have a number of works to which we can more or less confiently attribute only memebrship in a regional or national school, of which we have a number of examples of the Venetian (16th century), Genoese (17th century), and Bolognese Schools (17th century). Some of these drawings are stunningly beautiful finished works, some are quick sketches, and some are useful for studying how earlier collectors assembled their collections. We have found the study of these possibilities instructive towards our considerations of the art and practise of drawing and their relationship to both the paintings and the prints of the era. Old master prints long preceded old master drawings as objects of desire, and our collection of them goes back over 35 years (at least 5 years before we even dreamed of starting a gallery). Albrecht Durer's prints were our first love and it has been an enduring one; the works of early and mid 16th-century Italy, especially on mythological and religious subjects, began next; the works of the later 16th-century Netherlandish Mannerists, particularly those working with designs by Maerten van Heemskerck, Maarten de Vos, and Hendrik Goltzius (including Goltzius himself), are a more recent love, and we are just beginning to study the works of the eatly-mid 17th century Dutch artists.