A Proposal for Perin del Vaga and a Cautionary Tale on Sixteenth-Century Drawings for Medals

This article considers a drawing previously attributed to Leone Leoni and believed to be a preparatory study for the medals he struck for Andrea Doria. Leoni's problematic graphic corpus (an issue that has hitherto not been systematically addressed in the literature) is discussed, and the drawing, preserved at the Morgan Library and Museum, is pre-dated, ascribed to Perin del Vaga, and presented as a possible example of Perin's informal attempts in the field of portraiture – one of the least documented aspects of his work. Starting from this case, I argue that several sixteenth-century goldsmiths (Leoni included) preferred to design portraits for medals by modeling them in wax directly from life – a practice downplayed by the scholarship's emphasis on preparatory drawings (of which the sketch at the Morgan Library and Museum was so far considered a classic example).