Two Princes of the House of Este: Ernest VI and Francis II

This sheet is part of a series of some forty drawings by Pirro Ligorio, each representing a pair of distinguished members of the House of Este that once may have formed a long continuous scroll. The drawings were probably made by Ligorio to illustrate Giovanni Battista Pigna's “Historia de'principi d'Este”, the first edition of which appeared, without the illustrations, in Ferrara in 1570.

This work attempted to establish the unbroken descent of the Este family from the Roman Caius Atticus, and Ligorio's chronology is based on the genealogical tree supplied by Pigna. Ligorio's drawings were no doubt used as models for the monochrome frescoes representing two hundred notables of the Este family painted by two minor artists, the Ferrarese brothers Bartolomeo (1532-1577) and Girolamo Faccini (1547-1614), on the four walls of the courtyard of the Este castle at Ferrara before 1577.

If all the figures painted by the Faccini brothers were modeled after Pirro Ligorio's drawings, then at the rate of two figures to an architectural framework, as is the case with all the surviving drawings, more than half of Ligorio's designs have disappeared. Twenty-four of the drawings are in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, four in the British Museum, four in Munich, one in the Uffizi, one in Stuttgart, one at Princeton, and at least three in private collections. Ligorio's designs served as models for book illustrations only much later, when thirteen of them were used for engravings illustrating a text by Antonio Cariola, “Ritratti de' ser.mi[n] principi d'Este sig.ri[n] di Ferrara”, published in Ferrara in 1641.

Only three of the 100 fresco panels, that the Faccini brothers created, have visible remains of fresco painting. David R. Coffin (1955) states that Ligorio's drawings were definitely studies for the frescoes and that two of the drawings in the Ashmolean Museum correspond to the preserved fragments of the frescoes. J. Seznec (1954) states that the Ligorio drawings may originally have been in the form of a continuous band or scroll.