Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2008)

ZOLTÁN KÁRPÁTI: After Polidoro: A Newly Identified Drawing by Livio Mehus

admiration especially in regard to the vases and trophies of the first-floor frieze, with "innumerable things of fancy so strange that the mortal eye could not picture anything more novel or more beautiful."' A drawing preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest w

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as made after this frieze's second fresco from the left (fig. I).

8 The provenance of this work is the Esterházy Collection, where it was catalogued as Polidoro's work. However, when it came into the Museum's possession, it was inventoried only as a copy. Afterwards it gradually ceased to attract attention. It was on display at the Copies and Fakes exhibition in 1944, when Edith Hoffmann identified it as a copy after an etching by Giovanni Battista Galestruzzi (1618-1661),

9 a Florentine painter and printmaker, who made twenty-two etchings of the Palazzo Milesi façade around the 1650s.

10 Hoffmann compared the Budapest drawing with one of Galestruzzi's etchings, which is among the six sheets published between 1656 and 1658 that depict the vases and trophies (fig. 2)." However, since the drawing is almost double the size it is highly dubious that the compared etching was the model for the Budapest sheet, and the numerous differences between them —the decoration of the vases, and the position of the round shield behind the armour

—definite l HERE ATTRIBUTED IO LIVIO MEHUS. STUDY AFTER THE FAÇADE DECORATION OF PALAZZO MILESI. BUDAPEST. MUSEUM OE FINE ARTS