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This essay offers the conclusion of research on recently identified Italian drawings in the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden, the oldest collection of Old Master drawings in Germany.

As with my previous articles, the present essay is the fruit of a curatorial exchange programme between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden,2 and it focuses on the drawings by painters active between the late cinquecento and early seicento, who in various ways represented moments of reform against previously established mannerist vocabularies.

Drawings by the Campi brothers and their circle
A fascinating group among these later cinquecento drawings was produced by lesser-known Lombard artists, such as the Scene of a Roman Triumph, which can be confidently identified as a mature work by Giulio Campi (Fig. 2), though it is still housed in the boxes of anonymous drawings.3 It belongs with a stylistically coherent nucleus by this prolific Cremonese artist (c. 1507/8-1573), among which are particularly the studies for his fresco-cycle of the 1540s in the Palazzo Aldegatti, Mantua (e.g., Louvre, Paris; Biblioteca Reale, Turin; British Museum, London; collection of Jean Bonna, Geneva).4 Like many of the companion sheets, the Dresden composition is drawn with a delicately high finish on paper washed with the same ochre-mustard colour, and in the typical medium of pen and dark brown ink, brush and brown wash, accented with white gouache, over black chalk underdrawing. The minute precision of handling of this finished study is in marked contrast to the style of two considerably larger, bolder drawings which are related to each other, and which are therefore housed in the same folder.5 One of these two closely related sheets is of much finer quality (Fig. 3), and depicts the menacing scene of a bishop saint standing before fallen nude soldiers (St Ambrose as Patron of Milan Expelling Heresy); it is executed in pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, firmly squared on top in red chalk, in the energetic, bold drawing style of many of Giulio Campi’s undoubted sketches for pictorial inventions.

The composition of the Dresden sheet, however, is evocative of the design of much later projects: the competition drawings of the 1560s by Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Giuseppe Meda for the production of the still extant banner of Sant’ Ambrogio for the Commune of Milan (Castello Sforzesco, Milan),6 and also the designs seen in drawings of c. 1590 by Giovan Ambrogio Figino (Gallerie dell’Accademia inv. nos. 948, 954, Venice).7 The ambiguous scenario emerging from the interpretations of the surviving documents indicates that Arcimboldo may have ceded the project to design the banner of Sant’ Ambrogio at the time of his departure from Milan in 1562 for the court of Prague, and that the commission may have been passed onto Carlo Urbino on 18 February 1563, for a document of this date describes the latter artist ‘as having assumed the job of making a design to be painted on paper and on cloth for the new banner.'

The related, though much more crudely drawn, Dresden sheet (Fig. 4), in nearly the same technique, portrays the bishop saint on horseback in battle. The subject is almost certainly St Ambrose Combating the Arians, given that this composition closely resembles the design of Giovan Ambrogio Figino’s altarpiece of this subject (now church of S Eustorgio, Milan),9 for which innumerable preliminary studies by this artist exist.10 A scene of St Ambrose on Horseback Combating the Arians was also intended to adorn the banner of Sant’ Ambrogio for the Commune of Milan, as was commissioned in 1563 from Carlo Urbino.

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