ABSTRACT
During the second half of the seventeenth century in Italy, Padre Sebastiano Resta, a prominent collector and connoisseur of drawings who was based in Rome, assembled drawings in nearly 30 volumes. He organised the drawings in his albums to demonstrate a particular art historical point of view: the early development of visual art in Italy according to artists and schools, and in strict chronological order. Every volume illustrated a complete history of ‘disegno’, because his purpose was to display the history of Italian art in figures. This essay discusses the volumes entitled ‘Galleria portatile’ and ‘Felsina vindicata contra Vasarium’, which place him both in the tradition of Giorgio Vasari and in the anti-Vasarian polemic of the seventeenth century.
