Galleria Portatile ― Old Master Drawings from the Hoesch Collection

The collection of Old Master drawings compiled by the winegrower and historian Henning Hoesch has been built up since the 1980s and comprises works by Italian, French and Dutch artists from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. It is the result of a highly idiosyncratic pursuit whose interest focuses not so much on mature compositions as on insights into the creative process of graphic invention. In the search for drafts and detail studies in which the beauty of a pictorial idea becomes palpable in different and constantly surprising ways, the collector discovered some very unusual drawings. The spectrum ranges from Baldassare Peruzzi to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, from Claude Lorrain to Antoine Watteau, and includes works newly attributed to El Greco and Annibale Carracci, as well as lesser-known artists such as Cornelis Saftleven and the Sicilian, Filippo Tancredi.

Heiko Damm studied Art History, Komparatistik and Italian Studies in Leipzig, Berlin and Rome. His Masters thesis was about Berninis Holy Laurentius. In 2001-2004 he was an awardee and academic assistant at the Kunsthistorische Institut in Florence. Since 2004 he has been an editorial journalist for the Allgemeine Künstlerlexikon (AKL). In 2006 he received his Doctors degree, with the thesis: "Santi di Tito (1536-1603) und die Reform des Altarbilds in Florenz" at the Freie Universität Berlin. In July-December 2006 he was an academic contributor at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2007-2011 he was an academic contributor at Kunsthistorische Institut in Florence. Since 2012 he has been an academic contributor at Institute of Art History at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. Henning Hoesch was born in 1940 in Aachen. He studied History and Philosophy in Basel, Göttingen, Berlin and Aix-en-Provence, and received his PHD in Berlin 1968. He participated in a research assignment at the Institute of Canon Law at the University of Yale, New Haven Connecticut. In 1985 he started collecting Old Master Drawings.