Antonion II Badile Album of Drawings

About this book

Evelyn Karet's in-depth study of the Antonio II Badile Album-the earliest known example of an art collection pasted onto the pages of a book-is both focused and broad in its appeal to those interested in the early modern era. The provenance of the album is traced from its assemblage to the seventeenth-century collection of Conte Lodovico Moscardo to its dismantling by the dealer Francis Matthiesen in the 1950s, establishing that the volume conserved in the Frits Lugt Collection is not an original but a replica produced by Matthiesen. Although Antonio II must be celebrated as the collector of the drawings, new paleographic analysis has identified the actual compiler of the album after Antonio's death providing a terminus post quem in the late 1530s or early 1540s.