Album M (TOMO PRIMO) of the Florentine Collector Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri (1676-1742)

The inventory of the estate of Fra Bartolommeo, made after his death in 1517 by the arist Lorenzo di Credi, contains 830 single drawings and twelve drawing-books with approximately 180 sheets. They were left by Fra Bartolommeo to his pupil and assistant Fra Paolino da Pistoia (c. 1490-1547), who was also a Dominican monk in the convent of San Marco in Florence. In his turn he left the drawings to his pupil Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523-1588). Through her the drawings came to the convent of Santa Caterina da Siena on the Piazza San Marco in Florence, where she lived and worked as a nun. The famous artists's biographer and collector Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) already mentioned this in his 'Vite'. Fra Paolino and Suor Plautilla Nellini each made use of the drawings of Fra Bartolommeo in their own paintings.
In 1725-1727, almost one and a half century after the death of Suor Plautilla Nelli, the Florentine nobleman and collector Cavaliere Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri (1676-1742) acquired four hundred sheets with 505 drawn sides. These he bought from the convent of Santa Caterina, where in the course of the years a small part of the drawings must have got lost or they were sold separately. In 1729 Gabburri had the four hundred sheets mounted in two luxury bound albums, marked 'M' and 'N', containing respectively 206 and 194 sheets. Each of the albums has a title page, headed 'TOMO PRIMO' (Album M) and 'TOMO SECONDO' (Album N), which gives a summary provenance in Italian handwriting. In addition, Gabburri had a portrait of Fra Bartolommeo included in Album M, which was specially drawin for this pupose by the Florentine artist Giovanni Ferretti.
After Gabburri's death the two albums stayed together. The Gabburri heirs sold them to the English art dealer William Kent in Rome. Afterwards they were owned by some famous collectors: the English artists Benjamin West (1738-1820) and Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), the Londen art dealer Samuel Woodburn (1786-1853), the Prince of Oranje, later King Willem II of the Netherlands (1792-1849), his daughter princess Sophie of Oranje-Nassau, Grand Duchess of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach. When the grandducal art collections in Weimar were deaccessioned around 1920, the German-born collector Franz Koenigs (1881-1941) from Haarlem bought the two albums in 1923. They were acquired with his collection in 1940 by the Rotterdam collector Daniel George van Beuningen (1877-1955), who subsequently presented them to the foundation Stichting Museum Boymans.
In 1989-1990 the two albums were dismounted for reasons of conservation and to allow the drawings to be exhibited individually. The empty albums are still kept and shown at times. From 15 October 2016 to 15 January 2017 a substantial selection of the drawings (120), some together with the paintings (11) for which they served as preliminary studies (including loans from Italy, Germany, France and the USA), were shown to the public in an exhibition in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen: 'Fra Bartolommeo. The Divine Renaissance'. [text: Albert Elen]