Leonardo da Vinci and his Circle in the American Collections, The Drawings of. Corpus of 216 drawings on

81 ( 5 double full-page)  facsimile-plates

(45 x 31.5 cm, unbound) + catalog volume (in English, worked by Patricia Trutty-Coohill, 115 pp., 17 ills., orig. wrappers). Ed. by Carlo Pedretti. Dark-brown orig. leather cassette with imit. ribs and gilt stamped back-title.

EDIZIONE NAZIONALE. – One and only edition limited worldwide to 998 copies. – Titles in red + black.

and the circle about Leonardo together with latest exercises by Rembrandt and Degas, chiefly published here for the first time, among them then also

the  complete  series  of  the  104  caricatures  of  the  Spencer  Collection

made in the 16^th century directly from Leonardo’s originals, mostly lost, and therefore first-hand documents for the study of the complex problem of Leonardo’s preoccupation with physiognomy at the time of his studies for the Last Supper  (1495/97) :

“ At other times he came for three or four days without to touch upon his picture (the Last Supper), and for some hours he remains standing before with crossed arms looking at his figures as if he himself criticized them ”

(Manteo Bandello, nephew of the prior of the cloister for which Leonardo worked it, as eyewitness, quoted after Jack Wasserman, Leonardo da Vinci, Cologne 1990, p. 92).

The  actual  surprise

is the only 12 x 8 cm small autograph 1481 drawing of the

formerly with the Brown Collection and in 2001 a million heavy market spectacle. And that less as the perhaps unintentionally earliest representation of a poloist as rather in respect of its characteristic as

astonishing  model  for  Picasso’s

works in connection with a horse-pond of an immense broadsize as considered, but realized only by an oil sketch and the etching l’Abreuvoir  of 1904/06 (Bloch 8; Geiser + Baer 10). At which the latter interesting here only as far as it combines those works.

At first sight just forcing itself then the at least mental emulation in the nearly 2 m high monumental oil

“ Boy  Leading  a  Horse ”

of 1905/06 (Paley benefaction in the Museum of Modern Art, NY) as in both cases melting horse and nude into one another at the same posture and exercise of the former in each case. See hereto also Picasso’s preparatory sepia drawing Horse Leader of 1905 (Boeck, Picasso Zeichnungen, Cologne 1973, pp. 10 f. + ills. 10).
Offer no. 28,777 / EUR  3210. / Export price EUR  3000. (c. US$ 4489.) + shipping