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GIOVAN AMBROGIO FIGINO
Milan 1548 ~ 1608 Milan
Giovan Ambrogio Figino, a pupil of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, was one of the most important artists working in Milan during the second half of the sixteenth
century. Although he painted portraits and both religious and secular pictures, he is best known for his drawings. Large collections of these are to be found in the Royal Collection,Windsor, the Accademia,Venice,
and the Morgan Library, New York. Outstanding among his drawings are a large number of sheets, covered with small sketches, where he experiments with the arrangement of the whole composition and also the attitudes
of the individual figures. Figino travelled to Rome c. 1576–1577 where he copied Raphael and Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Last Judgement fresco. He also drew the antique sculpture in the Vatican and elsewhere. These Roman subjects appear throughout his sketches.
Our drawing is unusual because the large centralised composition of the Annunciation was executed before the small sketched variants appearing on the same sheet. There are two other drawings where the main composition is shown on its own. One of these, in black chalk with white heightening on blue paper and measuring 263 x 203 mm, is in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon.1 In this study the figures are reversed and the Angel Gabriel kneels. The second, in pen and brown ink with white heightening on (?)dark grey prepared paper and measuring 151 x 121 mm, is in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.2 Here the handling is similar to our sheet but the figures are only shown to the waist and the postures are different, particularly that of the Virgin who looks and listens in a much bolder manner. There are four other sheets concerned with this theme, but which demonstrate Figino's much more characteristic habit of covering a page with a number of tiny sketches. Three of these are in the Royal Collection, Windsor, and a fourth belongs to the Accademia, Venice.3 The Accademia sheet contains only one small Annunciation scene at the top centre of the verso but rather surprisingly this sketch, in blue ink, is closest to the large central drawing on our sheet.
The placement of the figures is similar as is the scale of Gabriel's wings. The Accademia sheet is dated 1586 which indicates a date for ours.4
Our full-scale Annunciation composition is also comparable to finished drawings for documented altarpieces of other
subjects, for example a Lamentation over the Dead Christ.5 The facial types of the women are alike as is the use of white heightening. In fact, the facial types, torsoes, limbs and draperies in our drawing match those in a number of paintings.6 It is interesting, in view of the large number of studies for the Annunciation,
that there is no recorded painting of this subject.
1. Cf. Gersheim photo no. 121572, B.M. ref. 147.
2. Gersheim, op.cit., no. 105025, B.M. ref. N990.
3. A. E. Popham & J. Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle,
London, 1949 inv. nos. 6933, 6937, 6939, 6944 6955 & Annalisa Perissa Torrini, Disegni del Figino, Galleria dell'Accademia di Venezia, Catalogo dei Disegni Antichi, Milan, 1987, p.126, cat.106 verso.
4. A. Perissa Torrini, op.cit., p.126, cat.106 verso.
5. Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Giovan Ambrogio Figino, Florence, 1968, p. 178, no.256 & p. 299, fig. 16.
6. R. P. Ciardi, op.cit., Pl. 19, Birth of the Virgin, S. Antonio, Milan.
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