Alessandro Maganza (Vicenza 1556-after 1630)

A double-sided study, also from the collection of Luigi Grassi, executed in the same technique and showing a closely related composition is in the Albertina, Vienna (inv. 24032; see V. Birke and J. Kertész, Die italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina. Generalverzeichnis, IV, Vienna, 1997, pp. 2313-2314, ill.). The attribution to Maganza of that sheet, along with another drawing by the same hand in the Albertina, was first discussed by Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat (The Drawings of the Venetian Painters in the 15th and 16th Centuries, New York, 1944, I, p. 292, under no. A 1754 and A 1757, pl. CC). Those drawings, and probably also the present one, come from a group of seventeen drawings by the same hand that Frits Lugt bought from Luigi Grassi and which were later dispersed (see J. Byam Shaw, The Italian Drawings of the Frits Lugt Collection, Paris, 1983, II, p. 263, note 2). Lugt retained several sheets in his own collection (ibid., nos. 252-257).