Графичен лист по Рафаел в Националната галерия за чуждестранно изкуство
A Reproductive Print after Raphael at the National Gallery for Foreign Art in Sofia

Summary/Abstract: A remarkable graphic sheet from The National Gallery for Foreign Art in Sofia (Inv. no. НГЧИ – IIг-1-1263) is identified here as an etching and attributed to the French scholar and reproductive printmaker Anne Claude de Tubières-Grimoard de Pestels Levieux de Lévis, comte de Caylus, (1692-1765). The print is in mirror reversal of a pen drawing by Raphael, now at the Ashmolean Museum at Ox- ford (inv. no. WA1846.179). The drawing depicts a violent battle of nudes in a composition that is not coherently integrated, suggesting that it was a preliminary sketch. It has been considered by experts as a study belonging to the end of the Florentine period of the Raphael, around 1508. An etching identical to the print in Sofia is to be found in the so-called Cabinet de Crozat or Recueil de Crozat, two massive folio volumes published in 1729-1742 in Paris by the great French art collector Pierre Crozat (1661-1740). That edition arranges by schools a canonical selection of Italian Renaissance paintings and drawings from several major French collections, including the one of Crozat. The publication is pioneering in that it combines a systematic approach to the works (e.g. the arrangement by schools, the use of a wide range of critical scholarship on the masters and the precise reconstruction of provenance records of the works) and illustrates them with 183 repro- ductive prints commissioned for the occasion by some of the most accomplished French masters. This article makes a special note of other pioneering aspects of the Recueil – its rare hybrid printmaking techniques that combine intaglio and relief processes and its use of colored inks simulate the medium of drawing in attempt to accurately reproduce the models.

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