Jean-Jacques Boissard’s unknown budapest drawings of antique Funerary monuments once in rome’s cesi garden: addenda to the publication history of Antiquitates Romanae

This article aims to attribute a series of nine unpublished drawings held in the Collection of Prints and Drawings of the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest to sixteenth-century French humanist author and draughtsman Jean-Jacques Boissard. The drawings were formerly catalogued as artworks by a minor eighteenth-century German theatrical set designer, Johann Paul Caspari. The proposed new attribution is based both on stylistic and contextual analysis of Boissard’s graphical oeuvre. I argue, that the Budapest drawings that depict Antique roman funerary monuments and copy their inscriptions, were created by Boissard during the lengthy publication process of his monumental illustrated corpus of roman inscriptions and monuments, titled Antiquitates Romanae . With one exception, all of the Budapest drawings depict monuments once found in Cardinal Federico Cesi’s roman sculpture garden. Boissard spent years in rome and had access to private collections during the second half of the 1550s. later, during the 1580s Boissard made several copies of his roman sketches for safety and entertainment reasons, and presented them to his humanist friends, patrons and publishers. The Budapest series, I propose, was once also a part of a larger set of drawings by Boissard during the 1580s, and was truncated into individual sheets later.