Bare-all masterwork was too much for prudish collector
RENAISSANCE nude drawings unseen for 300 years have been found between two sheets of paper among an artist’s sketches as it is revealed that they were covered up in favour of religious imagery.
The Courtauld Gallery has launched an exhibition of sketches by the 16thcentury Italian painter Parmigianino, and curators have deployed a scanner ordinarily used to check for fake passports to peer through the surface of the 500-year-old paper for the first time.
Experts examining a sketch depicting the Coronation of the Virgin were surprised to find, hidden beneath this image of purity, the outline of a male nude emerging from the covered reverse side.
It is believed that a later collector of Parmigianino’s work chose effectively to erase the nude, displaying only the religious image on one side, and glueing a piece of paper over the other.
Ketty Gottardo, the Courtauld’s curator of drawings, said: “These pieces of paper are two-sided, but someone has chosen one side as the front, and they have chosen the Coronation of the Virgin. The other side was glued up, possibly around the 18th century.
“The Virgin has been chosen over the nude – so a bit prudish, you could say.
They have gone for the safe religious imagery.
“Perhaps that tells us something about the tastes at the time, and what people wanted to collect and display.”
The anonymous collector also appears to have glued a sheet of paper to the reverse side of Parmigianino’s 1520 drawing Head of a Young Woman, and Courtauld scanning has revealed that this “erased” another male figure, this time a bearded man.
The covering-up of the figures was revealed by curators using a video spectral comparator – forensic equipment more widely used to detect forged documents, passports and counterfeit money.