Bonasone in red

Over fifty prints by Giulio Bonasone from Douce’s collection were transferred to the Ashmolean in 1863. At the time, they were integrated in the main sequence and they can now be found under the printmaker’s name. The print below, however, remained in one of the paper-lined wooden boxes that came from the Bodleian in 2003:

Giulio Bonasone, Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross, 1546, engraving (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Douce owned at least two other impressions of the Pietà by Bonasone, but this is the only one printed in red ink (WA2003.Douce.4579). The engraving, after a presentation drawing by Michelangelo now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, was formerly in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s collection -his stamp can be seen upside down on the verso:

The bottom left corner, which was missing, has been (quite nicely) drawn over in red chalk:

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