• Italian drawings by Domenico Piola and Orazio Samacchini take center stage at CHRISTOPHER BISHOP’s exhibition. Piola, a Genovese artist of the 17th century, drew Angels with Doves presumably for a fresco in the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa. Bishop says The Adoration of the Magi by Orazio Samachini, the late 16th century Bolognese artist, is an exciting find as it is a completely unknown drawing preparatory for a painting which was recently discovered and auctioned off at the Dorotheum in Munich. • PANDORA OLD MASTERS is showing interesting political drawings by Giovanni Costetti (1874-1949) of Hitler and Molotov. The recto, The Mask, from 1939, shows them when they signed the non-aggression pact, and the verso, The Face, from 1941, portrays Hitler and Molotov when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
• Among important 20th century artists being featured at the BARBARA MATHES gallery, you will see Agostino Bonalumi’s 1971 Progretto, a mixed media on paper, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Badnes, Cercles et Lignes, dating to 1932. • London specialist STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART always manages to acquire new-to-the-market works by the most iconic names in fine art including Edgar Degas, Thomas Gainsborough, Adolph Gottlieb, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Paul Signac, Alfred Sisley, Wayne Thiebaud and Odilon Redon. This year’s exhibition won’t disappoint as Ongpin is showing Gainsborough’s Travellers Passing Through A Village, Klee’s Night impression of a Southern Town, Degas’s A Seated Young Woman Plaiting her Hair, Matisse’s Standing Female Nude, Munch’s Rocks on the Edge of a Sea, Paul Signac’s Still Life with a Bowl of Fruit, Wayne Thiebaud’s Ice Cream Cone and Redon’s A Face in the Window.
• New exhibitor PRPH RARE BOOKS is offering an album of 70 uncensored 16th century drawings after Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. The original figures depict genitalia and other “lewd” elements which were later censored and painted over at the Church’s direction. These were generally unknown until the restoration of the work in 1980-84. They are bound in 18th century calf and were in the collection of Count Leopold Cicognara (1767-1834), the leading Italian art historian of his time. PRPH is also showing a highly important complete set of 50 engraved fortune telling cards (Northern Italy 1465) by the Master of the ‘Mantegna’ Tarocchi – E-series, rebound in 18th century cartonnato.