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The Vestibule of the so-called Casa di Michelangelo. Pen and brown and grey ink and watercolour. 19.8 x 14 cm. Circa 1790.
The architect, draughtsman and interior designer, Charles Percier, was one of the leading proponents of the Empire style in France and exerted a major influence on 19th century French architecture. A talented draughtsman, he was trained by Jean Jacques Lagrenée before going on to study architecture firstly at the École royale gratuite de dessin and then at the private school of architecture run by Antoine-François Peyre. It was here that Percier met Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, with whom he would subsequently cooperate very closely. In 1786 he won the Prix de Rome and spent the years from 1786 to 1792 as a scholar at the Académie de France in Rome. His studies after ancient monuments and Renaissance buildings in the city later provided him with designs for Palais, maisons et autres édifices modernes, dessinés à Rome, a work he published in Paris in 1798. After returning to his native city, Percier founded a private school of architecture. As an interior designer he helped to fit out the Paris opera house and other buildings and cooperated with Fontaine as one of Napoleon’s official architects. It was for the latter that he equipped the Château de Malmaison in 1799 and was also responsible together with Fontaine for the coronation celebrations in 1804.
Percier was an exceptionally gifted draughtsman, as is evidenced by a large number of his works, for instance in the Louvre and the Bibliothèque Nationale. The present sheet, which dates to around 1790 during his stay in Rome, provides an example of his sophisticated technique as a draughtsman. It depicts the vestibule of the so-called Casa di Michelangelo, a small building in a row of houses that until 1930 flanked the Cordonata, Michelangelo’s ramp to the Capitol. While this is not the house in which Michelangelo lived (although it was incorrectly described as such in the 19th century), the vestibule with the staircase has been drawn and engraved on many occasions. Jacques-Louis David is among those to have sketched it (Louvre, inv. 26167); engravings by Rossini, Pinelli and others present the same view.
Percier uses exquisite penwork and very delicate strokes of the brush to capture in soft shades of red, blue and yellow ornaments, the tritons and other hybrid creatures that make up the grotesque ornamentation of the vault. The arch at the end of the passageway affords a view of the courtyard, where a fountain basin with a sculpture of a river god can be seen beneath an overgrown pergola. At the bottom left, a date in Roman figures, probably 1578, can be read on a stone in the ground, presumably indicating the year in which the building was erected. While the sheet has all the attention to detail of a documentary architectural drawing, the scene appears anything but static; the sunlight streaming in around midday and the staffage figures playing with the cat introduce a sense of the momentary and ephemeral.
We are grateful to Prof. Dr. Hans Ottomeyer for confirming that Charles Percier is the author of this work.