LEON DAVENT (ACTIVE 1540-1556) AFTER LUCA PENNI (CIRCA 1500/04 - 1577)

A closely related drawing of nearly the same dimensions by Luca Penni has only recently been discovered and is now at the Metropolitan Museum, New York (inv. no. 2014.264). Penni's composition borrows various ideas and elements from Dürer's woodcuts for the Large and Small Passions, which in turn are inspired by Mantegna's engraving of the same subject.

Catherine Jenkins records a total of eight impressions in public collections, including two examples at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, with the same watermark. She believes that this paper was not used at Fontainebleau and that these impressions where printed elsewhere, presumably in the 1550s.

We are grateful to Catherine Jenkins, London, for her help in cataloguing this lot.