Vincenzo Leonardi (Italian, fl.1621-1646)
Seventeenth - Century Italian*
Citrus, Citrus sp.: fruiting branch
Watercolor and gouache over graphite
Annotated bottom center: 600
ca. 1630
Paper size: 12 x 8 in
Provenance: Cassiano dal Pozzo; Cardinal Alessandro Albani; King George III, by descent to George V; London Art Market (Mendelson); James R. Herbert Boone; Sotheby’s (New York), 16 September 1988, lot 154
Literature: D. Freedberg & E. Baldini, The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo: A Catalogue Raisonne. Part One -Citus Fruit (London, 1997), Plate 117

Not reproduced in Ferrari’s Hesperides, this drawing shows a fruiting branch of an undetermined citrus species. Its leaves are elliptical and narrow, with wingless petioles. The fruits are small, globose or sub-globose, each with a dark yellow peel and a prominent nipple at the apex. This and the following drawing [118] are unlike all the others in the corpus of citrus illustrations that came from the dal Pozzo collection, in that they show whole branches with fruits and leaves. They may well have been intended to illustrate some kind of herbal.

* Scholar David Freedberg attributes this work as Seventeenth - Century Italian

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