Oosters gekleed gezelschap in een gallerij

Antonio GHERARDI – Attributed to
Rieti 1638-1702 Rome

189 Elegant company in oriental dress under a portico
Inv. no. F 039
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, over black and red chalk, on light tan paper. Traces of a framing line in pencil. Minor damage due to corrosion of the iron gall ink.
391 x 258 mm
Inv. 1854: D 49 (“Perigiano, onderscheidene persoonen, onder eene Colonade”); inv. 1864: I 57
Provenance: Odescalchi; acquired for the Museum in 1790
(L. 2392)
Literature: B.W. Meijer, Il disegno veneziano 1580-1650.
Ricostruzioni storico-artistiche, Florence, 2018, p. 18,
note 113.

The old attribution was to ‘Perigiano’, perhaps a garbled version of ‘Perugino’. Several artists were known by that moniker in seventeenth-century Rome, including Gian Domenico Cerrini (1609-1681), called ‘il Cavalier Perugino’, and Cortona’s follower Paolo Gismondi (ca. 1612-1685). Luigi Scaramuccia (q.v.), briefly in Rome as a pupil of Guido Reni, also hailed from Perugia. None of the above seems a likely candidate for this drawing, however.
The Venetian-inspired subject, the technique, and some stylistic elements are reminiscent of Mola, and though the execution is too wooden to be his, the draughtsman may well have been one of his students. One suggestion, put forward by Luigi Ficacci (orally, 2 March 1995), was to recognize here an early drawing by Antonio Gherardi, who trained with Mola around 1657-1662 and whose early work exhibits a strong neo-Venetian interest, no doubt reinforced by the study trip he made to Venice and the north after Mola’s death in 1666 (Pascoli ed. 1992, II, pp. 288-289). The Stories of Esther in the Palazzo Naro in Rome are the most evident manifestation of this.1 But there is little else on which to base an attribution; few drawings by Gherardi have thus far been identified.2

Another possibility would be Giovanni Bonati (ca. 1635-1681), but again the rare drawings by this artist (Turner 1999, pp. 17-18, under nos. 26 and 27) offer no real points of comparison.
Like Van Regteren Altena (note on the mount), Bert W. Meijer (2018) believes our drawing to be related to the work of Francesco Montemezzano (1555-after 1602), a pupil and collaborator of Paolo Veronese, which would place it in a completely different orbit.

1 Executed in 1673-1675. See Angela Negro, “Antonio Gherardi a S. Maria in Trivio e a Palazzo Naro”, in exh. cat. Antonio Gherardi artista reatino (1638-1702), Palazzo Papale, Rieti, 2003, pp. 51-58.
2 Massimo Francucci, “Segnalazioni per Antonio Gherardi”, Paragone 105, 2012, figs. 17 (Besançon) and 18 (private collection), although these date from 1684. Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée has brilliantly recognized a drawing in a French private collection as preparatory to Gherardi’s painting in the Musée Fesch, Ajaccio (exh. cat. Rennes 2015, no. 32, repr.).