Crew Abandoning Ship (recto) Sketches of Corinthian Columns (verso)
c. 1600
Medium
Pen and brown ink with brush and brown wash, over traces of black chalk, on cream laid paper
Dimensions
37.4 × 27 cm (14 3/4 × 10 11/16 in.)
Classification
ink and wash
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
84623
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
This sheet presents a series of studies of ships in different action scenes. In the upper left, Tavarone rendered a ship in full sail with the whole crew depicted. To the right, fainter strokes render the outlines of other vessels mid-sail. In the sheet’s dramatic lower register, a vessel lilts far on its right side, while sailors bend under the weight of the items they carry off board the sinking ship. For the small, mercantile city-state of Genoa, shipwrecks were events of commercial and polit...