Painter of the Bible
Anonymous, Italian, 16th century
The Anonymous, Italian, 16th-century attribution covers approximately 44 artworks in the catalogue from the Italian Renaissance and Mannerist period whose original makers cannot be definitively identified.
Christ on the cross flanked by the Virgin, Saint Brigit and Saint ElisabethLife & work
The Anonymous, Italian, 16th-century attribution covers approximately 44 artworks in the catalogue from the Italian Renaissance and Mannerist period whose original makers cannot be definitively identified. The sixteenth century in Italy is the canonical period of the Italian High Renaissance and the subsequent Mannerist generation — the great Florentine, Roman, Venetian, Lombard, Sienese, and Emilian-Bolognese schools — with named masters whose works have been carefully studied for centuries. The "Anonymous, Italian, 16th century" group represents the residual cases where the broad Italian sixteenth-century origin is clear but the specific workshop or master attribution is not.
The bulk of the Anonymous Italian 16th-century works in the catalogue are small drawings — preparatory studies, figure exercises, and compositional sketches in pen-and-ink, red and black chalk, and brush-and-wash — that the catalogue can date by paper, technique, and stylistic convention to the broad Italian Cinquecento period without specifying the regional school. Drawings of this kind survive in considerable numbers across the major print-and-drawing collections; many were originally part of bound sketchbooks or workshop pattern books that have been disbound and dispersed across the antiquarian market over the past four centuries, and their original attributions have often been lost in the dispersal.
A typical Anonymous Italian 16th-century drawing is a small figural study or a small Madonna-and-Child composition that bears distant stylistic kinship with one or another of the named masters of the period (Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, Salviati, Bronzino in Florence; Raphael's late workshop, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Cherubino Alberti in Rome; Veronese, Tintoretto, the late Titian in Venice; Parmigianino in Parma; the Cremonese, Mantuan, and Sienese late-Mannerist workshops) without enough specificity to support a confident attribution. Continued scholarly attribution work moves some of these into specific master attributions over time; the remaining group preserves its anonymous status.
