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An Allegory of Painting
Red chalk and red chalk wash
Dated ‘26 January’ in the lower left corner
of the mount 24.2 × 17.9 cm – 9 1/2 × 7 1/16 in.
“If any art dares to rival Nature in its creations, it is surely painting. Everything that is seen, everything that is imagined, is the subject of its brush. But man is indebted above all to its felicitous representations, since, despite the inevitability of death, it brings him back to life in the eyes of posterity even more vividly than history or poetry can.”
Our drawing is a preparatory sketch for the reverse engraving of the Allegory of Painting (see BNF inv. RES-926 (6), fashion compendium Volume II, 117 plates, plate 89) (Fig. 1).