Новые архивные находки проливают свет на творчество Рафаэля, Рубенса и Тициана

Peter Paul Rubens was born on 28th June 1577 in Siegen, Westphalia. Some may recall that the 400th anniversary of his birth was celebrated in style back in 1977 with a clutch of exhibitions – including a very fine display of his drawings at the British Museum, London, and a splendid exhibition of paintings and drawings at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp (KMSKA). Original in conception but modest in presentation, this exhibition offers visitors to Como the opportunity to see seven watercolours created there during the three visits that J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) paid to the lake: in 1819, during his first extended tour of Italy, and in 1842 and 1843. Documents in French archives are here used to provide a chronology for Andrea del Sarto’s movements during his time in France in 1518–19. This new evidence supports the proposal that his encounters with works by Leonardo and Raphael, that were to be so important for Andrea’s subsequent career, occurred at the court of François I. Lorenzo Sabatini’s contributions to the Cappella Paolina in the Vatican marked the high point of his artistic career. Hitherto no complete study for the frescos he painted there has been located. However, a drawing in the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, can be attributed to the artist and identified as a compositional sketch for his Fall of Simon Magus in the cappella. A proposal is offered here for the origins and fascinating later history of two paintings which formed the wings of a triptych that date from the very early stages of Raphael’s career in Perugia and Citta di Castello. Details of their iconography suggests that they may have originated as a commission from a Benedictine convent. The recent discovery in the Vatican archives of a record of a 1550 privilege granting papal protection to Sebastiano Serlio for ten years for ‘certain works on architecture and painting’, both in print and yet to be published, provides new evidence for the workings of this form of copyright and the value of such privileges to authors and printmakers in the sixteenth century. In 1512 Giovanni Battista Bertucci the Elder (c.1475–1516) received the last great commission of his career: a large polyptych for the chapel of St Thomas Aquinas in the church of S. Andrea in Vineis in his native Faenza. The re-emergence of a portrait of a man, formerly attributed to Agnolo di Cosimo, called Bronzino (1503–72), in a private collection is a notable event. This article reveals for the first time, with precise references to attribution, chronology and original provenance, a painting from the collections of the Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, which has remained unknown until now.