Design for a Circular Border with Nine Female Figures (the Muses?)

This small, carefully detailed design of nine, seated female figures, with allegorical attributes of the arts (the muses?), is elegantly arranged along a circular border. The author of the drawing can now probably be identified as Luca Penni, thanks to Dominique Cordellier, author of the monograph on this artist, and who recognized it among the anomymous Netherlandish sixteenth-century drawings (written communication of September 5, 2014). The Met's drawing has had quite a history of incorrect attributions, since it was acquired in 1959, for a small sum of money, but erroneously attributed to the eighteenth-century British School.
Although previously thought to be a ceiling design, this was almost certainly a working drawing intended for a three-dimensional object of circular shape. The outer and inner circular outlines are drawn with compass, and the drawing has been cut into sections, much like a pie, in order to accommodate the design on paper onto the concavity of a bowl or platter. Though less likely, one cannot rule out the possibility that the cuts in the paper were done to adapt the design onto the convex form of a base. The functionality of the drawing can explain the very slight dryness of the outlines on the figures in some passages. Seen in the original, the little figures have still many spontaneous ticks of the pen which indicate high quality. The delicately articulated outlines and the shorthand notation for the facial features of the figures are typical of Penni's manner of drawing. The artistic training of the Florentine-born Luca Penni seems to have devolved in Raphael's studio in Rome between 1514 and 1519. His brother, the better known painter Giovanni Francesco Penni, was one of Raphael's major assistants and his artistic heir. Luca Penni married the sister of Perino del Vaga (another of Raphael's pupils), with whom he collaborated in the frescoes in the Palazzo Doria in Genoa in 1528. In the 1530s, Luca Penni went to France, and his most important work was accomplished at Fontainebleau, working with Rosso Fiotentino and Primaticcio between 1538 and 1548. The present drawing still shows many of the stylistic qualities that are Raphaelesque (the rapid fluidity of outlines, the dainty abbreviations of the faces), but mediated by the quick pen-and-ink style of drawing of Giovanni Francesco Penni and Giulio Romano. The design therefore probably dates around 1525-35, while the artist was still working in Italy. For a drawing from the French period by Luca Penni at the Met, see no. 2014.264.
(Carmen C. Bambach; September 17, 2014)