Genga Girolamo (Italian, Urbino (?) 1467–1551 near Urbino)

A study for the central section of the Dispute on the Immaculate Conception commissioned on 12 September 1513 by Bishop Girolamo Marchesi for the Church of Sant’Agostino in Cesena, and now in the Brera in Milan (B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Central Italian and North Italian Schools, London, 1968, pl. 1844).

Genga did not begin the picture before 1516 when he received forty ducati, ten per cent of the payment. The last portion of that amount was paid to Genga on 18 March 1518, probably when the picture was finished. However the official unveiling of the picture was not for another two years, on 28 August 1520, the feast day of Saint Augustine (W. Fontana, “La Disputà sull’Immacolata Concezione e l’Annunciazione di Cesena”, Scoperte e studi sul Genga pittore, Urbino, 1981, pp. 96-99).

A full compositional study for the picture with the figures in the nude is in the Britisch Museum (P. Pouncey and J. Gere, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the Britisch Museum, Raphael and his Circle, London, 1962, no. 270, pl. 254). That drawing was pricked and the outlines transferred to a slightly more finished drawing now in the Louvre (R. Bacou, Autour de Raphael, exhib. cat., Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1983, no. 4). A drawing for the Christ Child and another for the putto are in Besançon (inv. 1886 and 1887).

Christie’s, Old Master and 19^th Century Drawings, London July 2004