Title Page of Gabburri Album N

The two albums are bound in the same luxurious way in red calfskin, richly decorated and with gilt edges, objects of finery. Each of them has a title page at the front with the heading TOMO PRIMO and TOMO SECONDO (volumes 1 and 2). Underneath there is the concise provenance with a gibe at the nuns of the convent of St Catherine of Siena in Florence, whose ignorance supposedly caused many other drawings to be lost, ‘who instead of keeping them as precious delights made numerous parcels for coins out of them’. The two albums were compiled by Gabburri himself and serve to preserve Fra Bartolommeo’s 401 sheets with 505 drawings in a fitting way. Gabburri was aware of the high quality of the drawings and their functional relationship with paintings, and as curator of the Medici collections he was familiar with many of them. When he noticed a connection with a painting, he noted this on the folio beneath the drawing. [text: Albert Elen]