This collection is available for use by appointment in the Department of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. For further information, please email avery-drawings@library.columbia.edu.
8 sheets with 16 drawings (drawn recto and verso) of portals, arches, arcades, fireplaces, wall niches and other apertures. Drawings in ink with wash on paper, with some annotations in Italian. The sheets are from a dismembered sketchbook and are housed in a red leather-bound case titled "Architectural Drawings -- Beccafumi" on the spine.
This collection is available for use by appointment in the Department of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. For further information, please email avery-drawings@library.columbia.edu.
16th Century Italian drawings of portals, arches, and other apertures, Drawings and Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.
Accession 1000.096
Columbia University Libraries, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library
These drawings were attributed to Domenico Beccafumi, possibly by the dealer when they came into Avery's collection. Myra Rosenfeld included the drawings in a 1975 exhibition at Columbia University's Low Library on Sebastiano Serlio. In the exhibition catalogue, Rosefeld writes that "the series of drawings by the Sienese painter Domenico Beccafumi in the Avery Library may be copies of a lost architectural treatise by Peruzzi which was described by Vasari," (Rosenfeld, Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1555): an exhibition in honor of the five hundredth anniversary of his birth, page 2) and dates the drawings as circa 1512. The Avery Library catalogue entry for these drawings from 1976 notes that the drawings are similar to woodcuts published in Serlio's Regole generali di architectura (Venice, 1537). A letter by James Ackerman from 1982 kept with the drawings questions the attribution to Beccafumi as well as the 1512 date. In Myra Rosenfeld's preface to her 1996 publication, Serlio On Domestic Architecture (New York: Dover Publications), she notes that Lionello Puppi posits that these drawings are by Francesco Sanese, one of Baldassare Peruzzi's helpers. Serlio was an assistant in Peruzzi's workshop in Rome between 1515 and 1520 (See Rosenfeld, Serlio On Domestic Architecture, page 2).
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