Biagio Pupini, called Biagio dalle Lame

Dr. Ernst Gunter Troche (1909-1971), Nuremberg;

with Marianne Feilchenfeldt, Zurich, by 1996;

with Flavia Ormond Fine Arts Ltd., London, 1996,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, 2007, no. 7 (entry by Anne Varick Lauder)

The old attribution inscribed on this drawing – Biagio Bolognese – correctly identifies the artist as the Bologna native, Biagio Pupini. Though very little is known about his life and work, in his Le pitture di Bologna, the biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616-1693) referred to Pupini as a pupil of Francesco Francia (1447-1517).¹ Interestingly, Pupini was also a musician, and the 17^th-century biographer Giovanni Antonio Bumaldo (1601-1671) described him as 'pictor et musicus perexcellens'.²

The Nixon drawing depicts The Resurrection of Christ and though this subject does not occur within Pupini’s existing or documented painted oeuvre it does fit well within the substantial corpus of drawings that he produced depicting scenes from the Life and Passion of Christ. Many of these drawings, similarly executed in Pupini’s distinctive combination of pen, wash and generously applied white heightening, are today in the collection of the Musée du Louvre, in Paris.³

^1.Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Le Pitture di Bologna, Bologna 1686, p. 58

^2.Giovanni Antonio Bumaldo, Minervalia Bonon. civium anademata seu Biblioteca Bononiensis.., Bologna 1641, p. 248

^3.See Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. nos. 4271, 4274, 6376, 8842, 8843, 8845, 8846, 8847, 8849, 8850, 8852, 8854, 8855, 8891 and 9985.