Copy from Donatello's "Miracle of the Miser's Heart"
Artist:school of Raphael ( Italian, - )
Medium:pen and brown ink on laid paper
Dimensions:10 1/16 in. x 8 in. (25.56 cm. x 20.32 cm.)
Credit Line:Bequest of the Honorable James Bowdoin III
Accession Number:1811.6.a.&.b
- anchor in circle, six-pointed star above
Type: watermark
Location:
Materials: - "Polidor Caravaggio" (now removed)
Type: inscription
Location: bottom
Materials: graphite
- James Bowdoin III( Collector, Boston) - 1811.
- Bowdoin College Museum of Art( Museum, Brunswick, Maine) 1811- . Bequest
- 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)
- Bowdoin College Museum of Art. ( 8/4/2009 - 9/20/2009)
- Goodyear, Frank. ( 1/24/2014 - 1/4/2015)
This drawing is intriguing for the study of Raphael's artistic sources. It bears an old ascription to Polidoro da Caravaggio (1490/1500-1543?) and was recognized when first catalogued as a copy from Donatello, although the subject was misidentified as the Fall of Troy (Johnson 1885, no. 7).
In 1969, Michael Jaffé suggested that this sheet is closer to the manner of Pirro Ligorio (1513/14-1583) than to that of Polidoro and identified a related drawing after the same set of reliefs (Jaffé 1977, pl. 134). Oberhuber recognized the Bowdoin drawing as a copy from the Donatello reliefs and associated it within the immediate circle of Raphael, as a copy perhaps of a lost drawing by the master rather than of the reliefs themselves. At that time, he attributed the Bowdoin drawing to Giulio Romano (1499-1546). More recently, he has suggested that Giovanni Francesco Penni (d. ca. 1528), another of Raphael's assistants, is a more likely possibility. The precise attribution of drawings from Raphael's studio, particularly just before and after his death, is the subject of much scholarly debate (Gere and Turner 1983, 230).