Circle of Giorgio Vasari

New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, Sixteenth Century Italian Drawings, Form and Function, 1974, cat. no. 18a, reproduced (as Giorgio Vasari)

Edmund P. Pillsbury, 'The Sala Grande Drawings by Vasari and his Workshop: Some Documents and New Attributions',  Master Drawings, vol. XIV, no. 2, 1976, p. 128, reproduced pls. 1a and 1b (as Giorgio Vasari);
Ettore Allegri and Alessandro Cecchi, Palazzo Vecchio e i Medici, Florence 1980, p. 253, under cat. no. 19b and p. 255, cat. no. 42 (both as Stradanus)

These two fragments are related to the ceiling decoration of the Sala Grande (also known as the Sala dei Cinquecento) in Palazzo Vecchio.  Giorgio Vasari, who was in charge of the project, planned the subjects with the help of the humanist Vincenzo Borghini, and revised the iconographical program of the painted ceiling three times.  In a letter written to Cosimo I on 3 March 1563, preserved in the State Archives of Florence, Vasari presented a complete plan for the renovation of the ceiling, indicating the different subjects to be included.  But this first and complex plan apparently did not satisfy Cosimo, as Vasari soon presented a second scheme (now in the Uffizi, see Ugo Muccini, The Salone dei Cinquecento, Florence 1990, p. 83, reproduced).  

It is to this second plan that our two fragments relate.  Judging from the way they are cut, these must originally have been part of a single sheet, which represented schematically all the subjects of the ceiling.  On the verso they both bear a numbering which helps to identify their subjects. The smaller of the two (no.5) is the allegorical representation of the Colle Val d'Elsa and San Gimignano, while the larger (no.28), which shows a river god and a seaport, is the Siege of Porto Ercole.  The latter subject was discarded in the final decoration, in favor of The Rout of the Turks at Piombino, and was depicted instead on the lower walls. The third scheme (also preserved in the Florentine State Archives) essentially shows the present appearance of the ceiling, but with some changes in the arrangement of the scenes. 

In August 1563 Vasari was ready to commence the ambitious decoration and, as he described in the Ricordanze, the work lasted for three years and seven months.  To assist him on this elaborate and complex project he called upon, among others, Giovanni Stradano, Giambattista Naldini and Jacopo Zucchi.  First published by Edmund Pillsbury (loc. cit.) as Giorgio Vasari, the present studies have since been attributed to Stradanus, both by Alessandro Cecchi (loc. cit.) and by Florian Härb (verbal opinion), on the basis of stylistic comparisons with drawings securely by that artist (for example, Deliberation of the War of Siena, Pillsbury, op. cit., pl. 8a).  A number of studies by Vasari and his assistants can be connected with this project.  A drawing now at the Fogg Museum is a good example of part of a large sheet (Cartone Grande), illustrating Vasari's pensieri for the different compositions, which were subsequently given to members of the workshop to be used as the basis for more definitive modelli (see Pillsbury, op. cit., pl. 4).