Live Auction 21459Old Master and British Drawings and Watercolours
LELIO ORSI (NOVELLARA 1511-1587)
Lot 5 The Property of an American Collector

LELIO ORSI (NOVELLARA 1511-1587)

The Rape of Ganymede

Closed4 July 2023

Price Realised

GBP 27,720

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LELIO ORSI (NOVELLARA 1511-1587)
The Rape of Ganymede
with inscription ‘Lelio da Novellara’
black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown and blue wash heightened with white (partly oxidised) on light brown paper, pen and brown ink framing lines
24.5 x 23 cm (9 3/4 x 9 1/8 in.)

Unidentified collection (arms with an eagle, possibly the Gonzaga arms, not in Lugt).
Casino di Sotto, Novellara, by 1770.
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), London (L. 3016a); and thence by descent.
Thomas Blayds (1795-1849), Surrey (L. 2422).
Anonymous sale; Christie’s, London, 10 July 2001, lot 26.
with Flavia Ormond, London (Master Drawings 1500-1895, 2002, no. 2, ill.).
Private collection, U.S.A.

Specialist note

This drawing is probably a study for a lost fresco painted by Orsi on the façade of a house belonging to the Gentili family in Novellara (Monducci and Pirondini, op. cit., p. 246, no. 34). The composition follows the way in which Homer, Pausanias and Virgil describe the episode of the Rape of Ganymede, the handsome youth carried off by Jupiter in the guise of an eaglewhile hunting. Orsi treated the same subject in a fresco for the Rocca di Novellara (now Galleria Estense, Modena), depicting the scene in a more traditional way, with the nude boy carried away in the sky (Monducci and Pirondini, op. cit., pp. 80-81, no. 36, ill.). In 1770, the present drawing is recorded in the inventory of the Casino di Sotto, one of the Gonzaga’s properties near Novellara. It was later acquired by the prominent British painter and collector Joshua Reynolds.