LONDON, ENGLAND.- Sotheby’s will hold an impressive auction dedicated to Old Master Drawings on Wednesday July 10, 2002. The first part of the sale will comprise an exceptional group of rare early Italian drawings from the Collection of Jak Katalan and the second a remarkable selection of studies from across Europe. Presented in a separate catalogue, 79 16th and 17th century Italian drawings from the Collection of Jak Katalan will be sold to benefit the Department of Prints and Drawings of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C and are expected to realise in excess of £1.5 million. Drawings in this exceptional collection comprise works by important artists from Bernini and Carracci to Parmigianino and Barocci. Jak Katalan’s initial forays into art collecting centred on 20th century art, but from 1985 he concentrated on Italian drawings of the 16th and 17th centuries, assembling a distinguished group of works, which were exhibited at a number of museums in the United States in 1995-6, and will now be sold.
Virgin in Glory with Two Angels by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1636-39) is a black chalk on buff paper design included in the collection and illustrates The Assumption for the apse and high altar of S. Maria in Via Lata, Rome, for which Bernini provided designs by 1939 and is estimated at £75,000-95,000. This is the only known work by Bernini to focus on the Virgin’s Assumption. Two music-making angels float either side of her, prefiguring the visionary emergence of The Cathedra Petri in the apse of St. Peter’s, for which Bernini started making plans after 1655.
Head of a Man Looking Down, 1580-83 by Federico Barocci (1535-1612), a black and coloured chalk drawing on blue paper is a typical example by this excellent draftsman. Estimated at £ £30,000-40,000, this study of a bearded man is likely to be one of a series of studies for the altarpiece, the Martyrdom of S. Vitale. The altarpiece was commissioned for S. Vitale in Ravenna in 1580 and completed in 1583 and is now in the Brera, Milan. Study For a Seated Prophet is a fascinating and rare drawing by Italian artist Luca Signorelli (1441-1523). The drawing is the most important work by him to appear on the market since the 1930s and highlights the second part of Sotheby’s Old Master Drawings sale. The study is linked to the frescoed figure of a prophet in the nave of Santuario at Loreto, Italy and is dated circa 1491-4.
Signorelli was born in Cortona, a provincial town in Tuscany and obtained early recognition as a leading artist from major patrons of the day including Pope Sixtus IV, for whom he made frescoes for the Sistine Chapel and Lorenzo de’Medici. As a draughtsman Signorelli was one of the first Italian artists to favour the medium of black chalk over pen and ink. The present study is a major example, a document of his working methods, and a powerful illustration of his monumental and expressive approach to the human figure.
The other highlight of the sale is the appearance, on the 300th anniversary of his birth, of no fewer than three masterpieces by the Swiss artist Jean-Etienne Liotard, all very different in character, but all illustrating this remarkable artist’s fascination with the exotic. One is a spectacular gouache portrait of Count Ulfeld, Austrian Ambassador to the Ottoman court in 1740-41, who was painted by Liotard in Constantinople. This work has remained in the family of the sitter ever since, but the artist’s identity was unknown until it was recognised by Sotheby’s expert Julien Stock. The second is a beautiful, large pastel portrait of Lady Fawkener, whose husband was the English ambassador to the same Ottoman court. The third is a magnificent, full-length pastel of a woman in Maltese costume.
