Not known

[Drawing] [early seventeenth-century hand] 33 [Mount] 164 [x2]

• c.1515
  Datable to c.1515

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink over traces of black chalk; on laid paper (231x161mm), stitching holes at left edge, slight damage at left in former stitching fold, rounded corner at bottom right, inlaid (window on verso of mount) [Verso] Blank [Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart [Verso of mount] Window (222x154mm)

Bernardo della Volpaia

[Drawing] None [Mount] Fleur-de-lys in circle topped with crown (variant 3; cut at bottom of window)

The pictorial scene, depicted here c.1515, is of a sphinx reclining on an isolated rocky outcrop. The outcrop, except for the tall rock formations at the back, is flat and dotted with small stones and plants, and has meandering and stepped edge at the front of a kind found in many fifteenth-century paintings and prints, such as Andrea Mantegna’s Entombment with Three Birds and a drawing in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Taccuino Senese of a zoomorphic goat. The sphinx has a head and breasts like those of a young woman, recalling a similar figure in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Taccuino Senese, and faintly reminiscent too of the woman in Durer’s engraving of the Sea Monster (c.1500). She has crossed front paws that look like hands, except for the short claws clearly visible in the paw on the right, which is resting on the disembodied head of a ram, and rear paws that look rather vegetal in character. Attached to her back is a pair of many-feathered wings, and between them rises what must be a tail that ends in leaves and sprouting foliage, which in its snake-like form resembles those seen in creatures on the ceiling, painted by Pinturicchio in 1490, of the Hall of the Demigods in the Palazzo dei Penitenzieri, which includes a sphinx. What is problematic about this tail is that the sphinx has another one that is wrapped around her rear legs, an inconsistency which, together with modifications made to the black chalk underdrawing on the far right, highlights the likelihood that the drawing is not a copy but an image devised by Bernardo della Volpaia himself.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Siena, BCS, Ms. S.IV.8 (Taccuino Senese), fols. 45r and 43v (Borsi 1985, pp. 294–97 and 302–10)

Ashby 1904, p. 74

Drawing

Digitisation of the Codex Coner has been made possible through the generosity of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, Berlin.

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