Kárpáti Zoltán - Liptay Éva - Varga Ágota szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 101. (Budapest, 2004)

ANNUAL REPORT 2004 - A 2004. ÉV - PUBLICATIONS - KIADVÁNYOK - ANNA JÁVOR: Andrea Czére, 17th Century Italian Drawings in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. A Complete Catalogue

restorer's examination - including watermarks - as well as the complete preceding bibliographical and exhibition inventory. Albeit the multiplicity of artworks is known today among a wider circle, the signatures are deceptive, and the earlier attribution is not always enough according to today's value judgments. Some masters' names - such as Carracci and Maratta - have shaped a sort of notion of collecting, and in the better case, the designation of schools - exactly as a consequence of numerous disciples and followers, while intimate knowledge of the drawings has brought to the surface new artist personalities and the names of masters previously relegated to the background. In Andrea Czére's volume of 358 items, there are 130 new attributions, and beyond this, 110 artworks had to be transferred to other domains. The greater portion of them "'slipped across" to the side of eighteenth century Italian drawing, with their own new classifications; thus, we can anticipate their publication in the next catalogue volume of the same author. She succeeded in reducing the number of works still of unknown master by two-thirds, to 46, including those which previously were identified by a named master, but these works which today are considered attributed unfeasibly are here described with a new classification according to city, school or circle. An important and relatively recent perspective on the evaluation of drawings is the question of original destination and purpose. Though the main characteristic of the genre is spontaneity, in the majority of cases, artworks were called into being by some sort of objective: they either were produced for study after models, or - and the two are not mutually exclusive - as preparation for commissioned paintings, or perhaps graphic works. Those several cases in which exactly the same scene features on both the recto and verso exemplify the gradual, deliberate unfolding of subject matter: such as the composition with Venus and Cupid attributed to Guglielmo Cortese, or each study of Maratta's pupils. As a counter-example to the truly ephemeral, refined sketch of only the bare suggestion of a line, the four, large-scale colour studies of heads by Giovanni Antonio Burrini can be mentioned , which were prepared for frescoes of painted saints in the pendentives of the dome of the San Giovanni Battista dei Celestini Church in Bologna, or Carlo Cesi's design for an oval ceiling piece depicting the Allegory of Night, in the interior of a Roman palace. More hidden, though earlier recognised, is the connection between the well-known Carracci fresco (the Triumphal Procession of Bacchus and Ariadne) in the Galleria Farnese, and two detail studies preserved in Budapest, the female figure with tambourine - a nude in the drawing - as well as a half-length portrait of one of the accompanying Cupids. It is precisely the emphasis on the Carracci's that calls attention in the volume to the significance of copies: Andrea Czére has for all intents and purposes rehabilitated - and defended her standpoint on the academic doctoral debate on this book - those works that were previously categorised as second-class: approximately contemporaneous, yet not proven to be of the inventor's own hand, and with the denotation "after", has classified these alongside the reproduction of the model preserved in another collection, in the appropriate place of the catalogue. Today, and not only in the case of the eighteenth, but even in the nineteenth century, the significance of the inheritance of the motifs, artistic solutions - the "images" in this way is increasingly apparent, confronted with the criteria of originality only in relatively later periods in art history.