October 2008

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Drawings by Aurelio Luini
An animated and carefully pictorial drawing for the design of an oval architectural space (Fig. 6) can be securely attributed to Aurelio Luini (c. 1530-93), the son born late in life to the famous painter Bernardino Luini (c. 1480-1532).15 The drawing represents Christ

in Judgment with the Virgin and Saints, and the Fall of the Damned into Hell. Seen in daring effects of fore-shortening, the human figures are articulated in Aurelio’s typical manner with a nervously scratchy technique of outlining and hatching with the pen and dark brown ink, combined with a delicate layer of colour, and white goauche highlights.16 In this late work, he used the brush with purple wash and thick white gouache (mostly oxidised), over an under-drawing in black chalk. The watermark of an anchor inscribed in a circle surmounted by a five-pointed star suggests a north-Italian or transalpine paper;17 it may be remembered that Bernardino Luini worked at Lugano in the canton of Ticino (and possibly died there, before 1 July 1532,18 although this is debated19), and his son Aurelio also presumably maintained some such regional ties, as he worked in nearby Pallanza.20 The Dresden collection includes a less imposing, but correctly assigned sheet by Aurelio Luini of sketches mostly for a Flagellation of Christ (no. c 390), in pen and ink, brush and brown wash, with white gouache highlights, over black chalk, on green-washed paper.

A fascinating sheet (Fig. 1), albeit inscribed with a preposterously optimistic attribution to ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ on the late-19th-century mount, can also be added to the oeuvre of Aurelio Luini,22 as it reveals his characteristic technique of hatching with the pen and brown ink. Aurelio often drew a multitude of very fine, nervously pliant strokes to build up pictorial effects of tone, and, as is seen in this drawing, his selective use of red chalk accents combined with ink and various wash is also typical of his Lombard training. The subject-matter emanates from a uniquely Lombard, cinquecento tradition of theoretical treatises and paintings dedicated to the portrayal of the human figure in virtuoso effects of illusionistic perspective, ‘as if seen from below’ (di sotto in sù). The great masters in figural perspective of the second half of the cinquecento in Milan were Aurelio’s close contemporaries and associates: his younger friend, the celebrated theorist and letterato Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538-92), who produced frescoes and sketches of the human body in sharp perspective (note especially Lomazzo’s vault frescoes of 1570-71 in the Foppa Chapel at S Marco, Milan; and his manuscript Gli Sogni e raggionamenti, British Library, London, ms Add. 12196), and Carlo Urbino of Crema (c. 1525/30-85), a gifted illusionistic fresco-painter in his own right and the main author of the drawings and text in the Codex Huygens of c. 1560-80, after Leonardo’s notes (see Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, m.a. 1139).24 The Dresden sheet, which belonged to Sir Thomas Lawrence, presents a carefully constructed anamorphic design of the decapitated head of a man on a platter (a St John the Baptist?), in pen and dark-brown ink, brush and grey-brown wash, with some red chalk added lightly to indicate the flesh, and then pressed down heavily to accent the gruesome cut wound on the neck. The entire design was constructed over grids of stylus-ruling and compass work, supported by a preliminary underdrawing in black chalk or leadpoint, but which is now abraded. It takes as its point of departure the principles of perspectival transformation of the human head (a ‘plan and elevation technique,’ or modified parallel projection), in which the forms are the result of proportionally visualised views from the front, side, top, and bottom. While the earliest exercises in the perspectival transformation of the human head were described and illustrated in Piero della Francesca’s De Prospectiva pingendi (written before 1482), such problems were also later explored by Leonardo, Albrecht Dürer, and others. The general principle of construction for the anamorphic view of the head sotto in sù in the Dresden sheet may be based on Leonardo’s proportional projection of grids, of a circle with respect to an oval (‘De quadratura della figura ovale’), as the design in the Dresden sheet seems to more or less conform to what is described and illustrated in a treatise-like passage of writing by Leonardo in the Codex Atlanticus, vol. 12, fol. 1032r (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan), datable to c. 1508-10, in his second Milanese period.27 The Dresden head is mounted correctly, in its upright orientation, on the historic mount. Precariously resting on the platter, it is meant to emanate from a niche in a grotesquely gory illusionistic trick. The image may well reflect the visual taste for grotesque realism and arcane exercises in serio-comic literature practised by the Accademia della Val di Blenio (‘Academiglia dra Vall d’Bregn’), a Milanese academy of erudites founded in 1560 which communicated in its own invented quasi-Swiss language and with which Lomazzo was intimately associated, being elected its president for life in August 1568.28 Aurelio Luini was a prominent member, as well, of the Accademia della Val di Blenio, being known as ‘compà Lovign,’ and dedicating his talents to furthering Leonardo’s theoretical legacy.29