The book under review studies a group of fifty-nine drawings that entered the Louvre museum in 1803 as a part of a volume assembled by the Florentine connoisseur Filippo Baldinucci in the seventeenth century. These drawings, kept since the late nineteenth century as single sheets in the Department of Prints and Drawings (inv. 954–1011), are historically related to a fragment of writing ascribable to the same Baldinucci stating, “the drawings in pen and wash that follow in the next sixteen pages of this collection are all by Jacopo da Pontormo, and they were found bound in one of his books, that we have untied in order to be presented here. [T]hey are mainly studies made from paintings and antiquities in Rome. The notes that can be found on some of these drawings are by [Pontormo’s] hand; [they are] ascribed and confronted with other inscriptions by his hand that we conserve.”

Despite the paleographic confrontations led by Baldinucci, the attribution of these sheets to Jacopo Pontormo (1494–1557) has been dismissed especially since the comprehensive study of the artist’s graphic work by Janet Cox Rearick in 1964. The book by Jacqueline Lalande Biscontin, with significant contributions by Catherine Monbeig Goguel and Ariane de la Chapelle, offers new perspectives for addressing these works, as well as the functions of Renaissance books of drawings, and the multiple facets of the culture of copy in mid-sixteenth-century Italy.

A good half of the book is devoted to the study by Lalande Biscontin of the recto and verso of each sheet, with systematic discussion of every single motif present in the drawings, from architectural elements to ancient vases and sarcophagi, candelabras, and helmets, as well as partial copies from drawings and paintings by sixteenth-century artists such as Beccafumi and Pontormo (the latter likely stimulating Baldinucci’s attribution). According to Lalande, these works are indeed all copies, and the volume under review contributes in particular to the reconstruction of the incredibly dense network of exchanges and correspondences that shaped early modern books of drawings between the fifteenth and seventeenth century. More than from the direct observation of the same originals, this network originated indeed from the widespread practice of copying other drawings, thus greatly contributing to the dissemination of certain models through the decades, if not centuries. For the Louvre sheets, Lalande exemplarily shows the complex coexistence and montage of different visual sources, highlights the presence of motifs from late fifteenth- to early sixteenth-century books of drawings, such as the codices Zichy (Budapest) and OZ 111 (Berlin), as well as from the mid-sixteenth-century Tuscan books, especially the Libro of Raffaello da Montelupo (Lille).

The crucial and dense chapter by Catherine Monbeig Goguel explores with new arguments her 1992 proposal of attribution of all these drawings to a single artist, namely to the painter Sebastiano Vini (Verona, ca. 1528–Pistoia, 1602). Vini, known in particular for the imposing fresco of The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand in San Desiderio in Pistoia, was repeatedly involved in Medicean commissions in Florence, where he stood in contact with Vasari. The key proposal of Monbeig’s essay is that the eclecticism of subjects that characterizes the Louvre drawings—originally a single sketchbook, as confirmed by the scientific analysis of the paper and watermarks carried out by Ariane de La Chapelle—could reflect their use as models for young artists attending the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, or rather the Scuola dell’Ospedale degli Innocenti, both institutions where don Vincenzo Borghini, whose acquaintance with Vini is known, played a crucial role.

This long-researched book opens new perspectives for the understanding of the Louvre drawings, but at the same time betrays different aspects open to further research: from the actual ways in which Vini could have had access to some of the copied models and to other libri di disegni (see p. 330 for the possible role of G. B. Ricasoli, bishop of Pistoia; p. 331 for possible travel by Vini to Rome) to specific material aspects of the Louvre drawings, such as the two different and incomplete series of Roman and Arabic numerals, present on the borders of the sheets, whose meaning remains unclear. Yet all these questions arise only thanks to the work of the authors of this volume, who managed to set new parameters in the study of the “book” of Sebastiano Vini.