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  • "icus Sustris" (beginning of inscription cut by edge of sheet)
    Type: inscription
    Location: verso
    Materials: pen and brown ink
  • "Perino del Vago"
    Type: inscription
    Location: former mount
    Materials: pen and ink
  • James Bowdoin III( Collector, Boston) - 1811.
  • Bowdoin College Museum of Art( Museum, Brunswick, Maine) 1811- . Bequest
  • Mannerism in Prints and Drawings
    • Bowdoin College. ( 2/28/1984 - 4/9/1984)
  • Images of Women in 17th Century Prints and Drawings
    • Bowdoin College Museum of Art. ( 10/3/1989 - 11/5/1989)
  • Old Master Drawings at Bowdoin College
    • Bowdoin College Museum of Art. ( 5/17/1985 - 7/7/1985)
    • Clark Art Institute. ( 9/14/1985 - 10/27/1985)
    • University of Kansas. ( 1/19/1986 - 3/2/1986)
    • Art Gallery of Ontario. ( 5/17/1986 - 6/29/1986)
  • Northern Travelers to Sixteenth-Century Italy
  • Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire 1540-1680
    • Princeton University. ( 10/3/1982 - 11/22/1982)
    • National Gallery of Art. ( 1/23/1983 - 4/11/1983)
    • Carnegie Institute . ( 4/23/1983 - 6/19/1983)
  • Drawing on Basics
    • Bowdoin College Museum of Art. ( 10/14/1993 - 12/19/1993)
  • Old Master Drawings from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art
    • Timken Museum of Art. ( 5/13/2005 - 8/14/2005) 
Type: catalogue
Author: Henry Johnson
Document Title: Catalogue of the Bowdoin College Art Collections
Publ. Place: Brunswick, Maine
Reference: no. 8
Remarks: (as Perino del Vaga)
Publisher: Bowdoin College
Section Title: Pt. I, The Bowdoin Drawings
Date: 1885

Author: Rev. F. H. Allen
Document Title: The Bowdoin Collection
Publ. Place: Brunswick, Maine
Location: pt. 5
Reference: no 19, repr.
Remarks: (as Perino)
Section Title: [five parts of four illustrations each, with individual texts]
Date: 1886

Type: catalogue
Author: Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Document Title: Bowdoin Museum of Fine Arts, Walker Art Building
Edition: 4th
Publ. Place: Brunswick, Maine
Reference: no. 8
Remarks: (as Perino)
Publisher: Bowdoin College
Section Title: Descriptive Catalogue of the . . .
Date: 1930

Type: exhibition catalogue
Author: Thomas da Costa Kaufman
Document Title: Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire 1540-1680
Publ. Place: Princeton
Location: pp. 118-119
Reference: no. 40
Publisher: Princeton University
Section Title: A Selection from North American Collections
Date: 1982

Type: exhibition catalogue
Author: David P. Becker
Document Title: Old Master Drawings at Bowdoin College
Publ. Place: Brunswick, Maine
Location: p. 28-29
Reference: no. 11
Publisher: Bowdoin College
Date: 1985

This sheet entered the collections with a traditional attribution to Perino del Vaga, which was rejected by Bernice Davidson and Michael Jaffé, both of whom ascribed it instead to a northern artist. Konrad Oberhuber first recognized it in 1977 as an autograph drawing by Sustris and suggested it was a design for the allegorical paintings in the Knight's Hall in Trausnitz Castle in Landshut. This attribution was affirmed by Heinrich Geissler, who also tentatively associated it with the Trausnitz designs in an April 1981 letter to David P. Becker. In 1981, the sheet was removed from the original mount, revealing the inscription on the verso and reinforcing the attribution to Sustris.

The style of the Bowdoin sheet is closely related to two similar designs by Sustris for female personifications in the Graphische Sammlung Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. They are figures of Concordia and Potesta and are of very similar dimensions to the Bowdoin design. One known study of Mars for the Trausnitz Knight's Hall is in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Trausnitz Castle suffered from damage and neglect from the seventeenth century onward, but guidebooks written in the nineteenth century provide an overview of now lost sections (Maxwell, 41-42). Crown Prince Wilhelm intended his residence as a symbol of the political power of the Wittelsbach family. The Knight’s Hall served as the primary reception room for all visitors to the castle and was decorated between 1577 and 1580 (Maxwell, 44)

The figure of Peace in the Bowdoin drawing is shown as a woman holding a palm branch in her left hand and a torch in her right, with which she is setting fire to a pile of weapons. Kaufmann points out that this same iconography was used in a painting by Francesco Salviati in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, which Sustris would have seen while working there. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann was not able to find a painting specifically related to the Bowdoin design at Trausnitz. The image of Peace that does appear in a painting at the castle depicts a female figure holding a palm branch and a laurel, seemingly alighting from above. Hence, DaCosta Kaufmann suggests that the Bowdoin sheet could be a preliminary study by Sustris for the painting, and therefore datable to the period of his work at the castle in the 1570s (DaCosta Kaufmann, cat. no. 40). Susan Maxwell has proposed that the sheet is in fact a workshop design after one of Sustris’s drawings of Victory rather than Peace (Maxwell, 58).

David P. Becker (edited by Sarah Cantor)

References:

DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas. Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire, 1540-1680: A Selection from North American Collections. Princeton, NJ: Art Museum, Princeton University, 1982.

Maxwell, Susan. The Court Art of Friedrich Sustris: Patronage in Late Renaissance Bavaria. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.

Artist Biography:

Friedrich Sustris was the son of the Dutch artist Lambert Sustris (c. 1510/15-after 1560), who emigrated to Italy from Amsterdam and worked in Venice and Padua. Friedrich was probably trained by his father and then worked from 1563 to 1567 in Florence, primarily with Giorgio Vasari. He participated in the decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio and the design of Michelangelo's tomb, among other projects. In 1568 he was commissioned by the banker Hans Fugger to execute designs for the interior and exterior of his house in Augsburg. From 1573, Sustris worked for Crown Prince Wilhelm of Bavaria (the future Duke Wilhelm V), at first in Landshut, and then after 1580 in Munich. There he became virtually the court artist, being entrusted with the design and supervision of all important artistic activities.

David P. Becker (edited by Sarah Cantor)

Commentary credited to David P. Becker (or not otherwise captioned) appeared in his catalogue Old Master Drawings at Bowdoin College (Brunswick: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1985).