🔍
Advanced Search

Avanzino Nucci’s birthplace is close to the city of Città di Castello in Umbria, and he is referred to as Avanzino da Città di Castello by his biographer, Giovanni Baglione, who relates that the artist came to Rome at an early age and first studied with Niccolò Circignani. Avanzino was employed by Sixtus V (1585-90) in the decoration of most of the projects undertaken by that pope. In the last decade of the 16th century he is documented in Naples but he returned to Rome by1599/1600 when he worked on the frescoes in the transept of S. Giovanni in Laterano. Nucci seems to have spent the rest of his life in Rome and is documented there through the 1620s. Recent scholarship has made Nucci’s position in the history of late 16th-century Italian draughtsmanship more prominent, as the well-known so-called Polidoro (da Caravaggio) Album in the Frits Lugt Collection (Paris) can now be securely attributed to him (J. Katalan, “Avanzino Nucci and the Polidoro Album,” Master Drawings, 28[1990], pp. 173-80). The attribution of this sheet has been confirmed by Alessandro Zuccari and Jak Katalan. The former believes that this drawing dates from Nucci’s mature stage of production. The latter ranks this sheet among his finest drawings. The use of pen and brown ink with wash over black chalk is constant in the artist’s oeuvre, though unlike this sheet, many of his drawings incorporate white heightening and are made on blue paper. This drawing reflects many of Nucci’s characteristic traits: a shorthand method of rendering facial and anatomical details, the sketchy rendering of hands, the use of elongated bodies with small heads, and the lack of variety of his physiognomies.