The Annunciation

Francesco Curia can be rightly considered the most relevant artist active in Southern Italy during the Sixteenth century. The present sheet is one of eight pen sketches (Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. nos.1970.101.4-11) figured in an album containing "97 pezzi di Francesco Curia" (97 pieces by Francesco Curia) formerly in the collection of Nicodemus Tessin the Younger (1654-1728), and then inherited by his son Carl Gustav Tessin (1695-1770), the greatest Swedish collector of drawings of the Eighteenth century. Curia's sketchbook seems to have been broken up in the latter's lifetime. Eighty-two of these sheets are now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm; those in the Metropolitan Museum came to New York by way of a Swedish collector who acquired them from a collateral descendant of Tessin. In their studies, Per Bjurström and Walter Vitzthum have pointed out the importance of this group of drawings, which forms a touchstone for our knowledge of Francesco Curia as a draughtsman.