Attributed to Lorenzo Sabatini Bologna circa 1530 - 1576 Rome

New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, Sixteenth Century Italian Drawings, Form and Function, 1974, cat. no. 25, reproduced 

This impressive drawing is a preparatory study for the area to the left of the archway leading to the main altar, on the east wall of the Oratorio del Gonfalone, Rome.  Though recently restored, the fresco itself is so damaged and repainted that the surviving preparatory drawings are the most useful guide in determining a possible attribution.  Another finished study, in black chalk heightened with white on blue paper, for the same section but showing a slightly different composition, is in the British Museum (fig. 1); first published by Popham as Follower of Bertoja, it is now kept under the name of Sabatini (see A.E. Popham, Artists working in Parma in the Sixteenth Century, London 1967, pp. 119-20, cat. no. 238, reproduced plate 151).  Judging from what remains of the original fresco, the present study seems to be the closest to the final composition.  When Konrad Oberhuber reviewed Popham's catalogue of the British Museum drawings (see Master Drawings, vol. VIII, no. 3, 1970, p. 285), he wrote: 'no. 238, for another fresco in the Oratorio, has always had a strong Bolognese flavor for me, making me think of Denis Calvaert.  I learnt from Mr. Edmund Pillsbury that it is most probably by Lorenzo Sabatini, who may have supplied the design for a painter in the Oratory, in a way that he did for so many other frescoes in Rome'. 

On stylistic grounds the attribution to Sabatini still seems to be a plausible one (although discarded in the latest publication on the Oratorio del Gonfalone, see Literature).  Besides its obvious Emilian characteristics, the drawing shows a strong Vasarian influence and a compositional debt to Raphael's decoration in Santa Maria della Pace.  These stylistic clues point towards an artist such as Sabatini even if, according to Baglioni, he only arrived at the beginning of the papacy of Gregory XIII (1572-1585).  This is not, in fact, any obstacle to his having participated in the decoration of the Oratorio, because although Bertoja began work on the commission between the spring of 1568 and the beginning of 1569, interruptions and lack of funds delayed its completion until about 1576.  Other well-known artists of the period were involved in completing the scheme, begun by Bertoja, among them Livio Agresti, Marco Pino, Matteo da Leccia, Cesare Nebbia and Federico Zuccaro.  The decorations depict episodes from the Passion of Christ, surmounted by pairs of full-size figures of Sibyls, Prophets and Angels. The ensemble of the frescoes is one of the most harmonious and satisfactory of Roman mannerist decorations.