Copy of Scene from the Life of Sulla fresco, in the Hall of Saturn, Pitti Palace

Cesare Dandini · after 1665

Medium

Black chalk, heightened with white chalk, with pen and brown ink and brush and red gouache, on blue-gray ground, on ivory laid paper

Original size

22.5 × 37.7 cm (8 7/8 × 14 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

This preparatory study captures the ceremonial grandeur of Cesare Dandini's fresco cycle in Pitti Palace's Hall of Saturn, preserving in chalk and ink what was conceived for a far grander scale on plastered walls. Dandini was one of seventeenth-century Florence's most refined decorative painters, working in the orbit of the Medici court and bringing an elegant, almost lyrical quality to historical and mythological subjects. This drawing — worked in black and white chalk with pen, brown ink, and touches of red gouache on a tinted ground — shows his command of dramatic figure composition and his ability to translate monumental fresco thinking onto paper. The blue-gray ground acts as a mid-tone, letting the white heightening carve out light with remarkable economy. The work belongs to a group of studies related to the Pitti Palace decorative program, one of the most ambitious court commissions in late Medici Florence, and survives today in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Dandini's assured draftsmanship and theatrical sense of light into the richness of oil on canvas, giving this seldom-seen study a presence and permanence suited to any wall.