The fabulously wealthy and learned Comte de Caylus, whose drawing collection numbered in the thousands, including our sheet, affirmed the appreciation of drawing as a mark of the cultivated connoisseur.  In a lecture delivered to the French Academy in 1732, the Comte held that the "great man is formed not only by the gifts of nature" but also by "the sight of beautiful drawings".

Stefano Zuffi calls Salviati's The Visitation "a quintessential work of second-generation Mannerism.  It effectively demonstrates the key role that Salviati played in the evolution of the style in Rome ... The painting can be viewed as a vast repertory of motifs, not only in regard to the architectural background, but (and above all) for the poses of the individual figures. He glacially interprets subjects and characters taken from classical antiquity. He also used judicious quotations from Raphael ... Salviati's draughtsmanship was impeccably perfect. He could conjure up new spaces merely by painting two characters entering a scene."

The polish and high state of finish of our large sheet suggests that it is a ricordo of the Master's fresco, perhaps preparatory to an engraving.

* * *

The Italian artist, Francesco de Michelangelo de' Rossi, known as Salviati, was a leading Florentine mannerist painter of the mid-cinquecento. In Florence, Salviati was a pupil successively of Bugiardini, of Bandinelli (in whose school he encountered his contemporary, Vasari), and then briefly of Raffaelle Brescianino. From 1527 until 1530, he was in the shop of Andrea del Sarto, where he remained until del Sarto's death. In 1531, he was called to Rome by Cardinal Giovanni Salviati, from whom he took his name. The Cardinal desired an artist in his personal employ, and seems to have considered Salviati the most promising young painter of the time. In 1531, he was joined in Rome by his friend, Giorgio Vasari. In Vasari's chapter on Salviati in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects of 1568, he tells how avidly both devoted themselves to the study of the artistic riches that they found there. Salviati very quickly found Roman patronage, especially from other Florentines then resident in Rome, but his early fresco works for them are lost. He attracted the attention of Pier Luigi Farnese, son of Pope Paul III, and was employed on commissions for frescoes, including The Visitation, recorded in our drawing. (3) His first surviving Roman piece is an Annunciation (Rome, S. Francesco a Ripa) of ca. 1533-5. He was greatly influenced by Michelangelo, Raphael, and especially by Parmigianino. His mature style shows a typically mannerist range of sources: it is reminiscent of the works of both Raphael and Michelangelo, but is endowed with a new elegance, artificiality and complexity. Although a number of easel paintings are to be found in the Pitti and Uffizzi galleries, he specialized in large-scale, multifigured mural decorations, usually packed with allegory and archeological detail. Salviati's works, such as his decorations for the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, were characteristic of the mannerist style in their extreme complexity, display of chiaroscuro technique, elongated figures and spatial and pictorial ambivalence. He designed tapestries, book illustrations, silver objects, temporary decorations for festivities; his projects for armor and vases, in particular, present forms melded into perpetual change and are above all for a decorative end, and inventive and full of fantasy. Salviati's drawings can be placed among the greatest accomplishments of that art of the Cinquecento. (4) Stefano Zuffi calls Salviati's draughtsmanship "impeccably perfect." (5) Salviati's drawings are to be found in the Uffizzi, the Ambrosiana in Milan, the National Museum in Stockholm, the British Museum, and many other collections.

Salviati spent his career travelling between Florence and Rome. He also visited northern Italy from 1538 to 1541, and Fontainebleau in 1554, called there by François I. Salviati departed from Rome late in 1538 or early in 1539 to return to Florence briefly, from which he travelled via Bologna to Venice, remaining in Venice into 1541. He returned to Rome by way of Verona, Mantua and the Romagna. Besides receiving early commissions in Rome, he worked in Florence (where he executed the decorations for the marriage of Cosimo I de'Medici to Eleanora of Toledo), in Venice (in the service of the Grimani family), and again in Rome (where he decorated the Palazzo Farnese and Palazzo Sacchetti). (6)

In 1543, Salviati returned to Florence. His first major exercise in Florence was the fresco decoration in the Palazzo Vecchio of the Sala dell'Udienza, where the theme supplied him was the celebration of Cosimo's regime in the guise of the history of a great - but unpopular - antique tyrant, the Roman Camillus.

The Visitation

In 1538 Salviati was engaged to join his recently arrived compatriot, Jacopino, in beginning a fresco decoration of the Oratory of S. Giovanni Decollato, a Florentine establishment in Rome of which the purpose was the charity of consoling prisoners condemned to execution. Despite its morbid purpose, the Confraternity chose to make their oratory a showpiece of modern decoration. This ambition provided a place and opportunity for Salviati and Jacopino to demonstrate a new style on a major scale. Later, over the course of more than a decade, the oratory became the most important collective artistic manifestation of its time in Rome and the monument most representative of the emergence of Roman high Maniera style. Salviati's initial contribution, the Visitation (dated 1538), is visibly not yet entirely mature, but the high creative intelligence it shows and the symptoms in it of a new phase of Maniera mark a clear stage in the accomplishment in Rome of high Maniera style. Perino had by now returned, but as yet had made no major new work, and in the Visitation Salviati's chief model is still Perino's accomplishment of an earlier date, the Capella Pucci of SS. Trinità in particular. Added to it is a demonstration of the results of some years of assiduous Roman study, in the form of borrowings not only from Perino but from masters of the classical style, namely Raphael and Peruzzi; but these two are transcribed by a formula that is Perino-based. The tendency to make intellectual and aesthetic capital, to this degree out of reference to high authority, and classical authority especially, is a symptom of an attitude of high Maniera. (7)

Zuffi terms The Visitation "a quintessential work of second-generation Mannerism [which] effectively demonstrates the key role that Salviati played in the evolution of the style in Rome." "The painting," he continues, "can be viewed as a vast repertory of motifs, not only in regard to the architectural background, but (and above all) for the poses of the individual figures. He glacially interprets subjects and characters taken from classical antiquity. He also used judicious quotations from Raphael ..." (8)
                                                      

(1) Italian Painting, Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Cologne, Text Research by Stefano Zuffi.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Liechtenstein: The Princely Collections, © 1985 The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Prince of Liechtenstein Foundation, Exhibition Catalogue, p. 204.
(4) Maîtres du Dessin - Dictionnaire, © R.C.S. Libri & Grandi Opere S.p.A., Milan, 1994, p. 150 (Translated)
(5) Zuffi, op. cit.
(6) Master Drawings from the Woodner Collection, an Exhibition Catalogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, © 1990 The Ian Woodner Family Collection, Inc.
(7) Freedberg, S.J., Painting in Italy 1500- 1600, © 1993, published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
(8) Zuffi, op. cit.