An exhibition of more than fifty Italian Old Master drawings selected from the Ratjen Foundation in Vaduz, Liechtenstein. Unfamiliar to American audiences, these drawings were assembled over three decades by Dr. Wolfgang Ratjen, who established the foundation to provide a permanent home for his collection. Works in the exhibition spanned some 250 years, beginning with Guilo Romano in the first half of the sixteenth century, continuing with a strong preference for baroque and rococo sketches, and ending with a few neoclassical studies from the late eighteenth century. An unusual number of the drawings were enlivened by colored inks, tempera, and chalks: two dramatic studies by Domenico Tintoretto for paintings in the Ducal Palace, Venice; a plump, fuzzy marmot, detailed hair-by-hair by Jacopo Ligozzi; Volterrano's Flight into Egypt in which the figures are almost obliterated by a swirl of black and red chalk. While the drawings originated from many regions of Italy — Rome, Florence, Siena, Bologna — the Venetian school predominated.
Catalogue cover.