Vincenzo Tamagni (San Gimignano 1492-circa 1530)

Correctly attributed to Tamagni by Giovanni Morelli, its earliest known owner, this spirited double-sided sheet was probably part of a sketchbook which gathered ideas for two separate compositions. The Virgin and Child on the recto constitutes an early sketch for the enthroned group featured at the centre of a Sacra Conversazione with the Virgin and Child and six saints further developed by Tamagni on three sheets in the Musée de Grenoble, Biblioteca Reale, Turin and the Princeton Art Museum (see Pagliano, op. cit., figs. 8, 8.1, 8.2). Each sheet shows an increasing degree of finish for the composition, probably executed by Tamagni in preparation for an altarpiece, like the panel in San Gerolamo, in his native San Gimignano (1522), or the Sacra Conversazione in the church of San Francesco, Pomarance (1525). Remarkably, each of the four sheets carries studies for the story of Diana and Actaeon on the verso (op. cit., figs. 8 verso, 8.3, 8.4). Quickly rendered in pen and ink, the present one shows Actaeon still in his human form, as in the sheet in Grenoble, while he is already transformed into a stag in the Turin and Princeton drawings. Tamagni was active in Rome in Raphael’s workshop at the Farnesina.