Early drawings from the 14th and 15th centuries are rare. Although seldom preserved, the early history of drawings collected in early modern northern Italy is documented in inventories and descriptions, illuminating our understanding of one of the quintessential aspects of Renaissance culture and the aesthetics of that culture. My paper surveys lost drawings in the collections of professional artists, artist-collectors, and amateur private collectors including men of letters, humanists, aristocratic patrons and ordinary citizens. Ranging from the early fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries the lost drawings include those in the northern Italian collections of usurer Oliviero Forzetta (1335–1373); master Francesco Squarcione (1394/7-1468); humanist Felice Feliciano (1433 -1479); patron Isabella d’Este (1474-1539); Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470-1547); humanist-jurist Marco Mantova Benavides (1489-15820); patrician Gabriele Vendramin (1484-1552); Cardinal Domenico Grimani (1461-1523); letterato Marcantonio Michiel (1484-1552); patrician-senator Giacomo Contarini (1536-1595); Counts Mario Bevilacqua (1536-1593) and Girolamo Canossa (1534/36-1592) and cittadino Federico Morando (1561-1607). Such early collections of lost drawings stimulated the awareness, appreciation and potential of drawings thereby promoting a growing interest in their collection.

Pontormo’s frescoes in the choir of San Lorenzo were a complex cycle of over fourteen subjects covering an area twice the size of the famous battle cartoons of Michelangelo and Leonardo combined–yet, according to conventional wisdom it seems they had little influence on subsequent art. Destroyed in 1738, the status of the paintings has been a vexed issue in Renaissance art. Antonfrancesco Doni predicted they would be a marvel; Vasari claimed Pontormo failed utterly. It has been argued that Pontormo deformed his subjects because he was eccentric and that they were so unpleasant that other artists ignored them.  Abandoning notions of Pontormo as neurotic, which reflect a now dated concept of “Mannerist Art,” new documents and a new reconstruction will reveal the influential afterlife of Pontormo’s inventive images.

Pontormo’s frescoes in the choir of San Lorenzo were a complex cycle of over fourteen subjects covering an area twice the size of the famous battle cartoons of Michelangelo and Leonardo combined–yet, according to conventional wisdom it seems they had little influence on subsequent art. Destroyed in 1738, the status of the paintings has been a vexed issue in Renaissance art. Antonfrancesco Doni predicted they would be a marvel; Vasari claimed Pontormo failed utterly. It has been argued that Pontormo deformed his subjects because he was eccentric and that they were so unpleasant that other artists ignored them.  Abandoning notions of Pontormo as neurotic, which reflect a now dated concept of “Mannerist Art,” new documents and a new reconstruction will reveal the influential afterlife of Pontormo’s inventive images.

Though the colossal statute had tumbled to the earth over a millennium previous, the silhouette of Helios striding across the harbor at Rhodes was familiar to educated viewers from Renaissance Nuremberg to Naples. Remembered from the notices of Pliny and Strabo, the ancient giant was perhaps most efficaciously evoked in dozens of engravings and etchings produced in print centers from London to Rome and Cologne to Utrecht. This talk examines these resurrections in paper and ink, exploring how artists including Maarten van Heemskerck, Gerard de Jode, and Antonio Tempesta fabricated enduring and fantastical traces of this ever- absent wonder. In these prints, the colossal sun god appears paradoxically both as lost and mourned fragment and simultaneously as an incorruptible monument to the flowering of classical civilization. For Renaissance printmakers and collectors the colossus straddled not only land and sea, but also the permeable boundaries between ruin and reconstruction.