- 47
* Paolo Caliari, called Il Veronese Verona 1528 - 1588 Venice
Description
- Paolo Caliari, called Il Veronese
- a seated nude young man, looking upwards and seen from below, and a detail of the legs of another figure
- bears inscription in brown ink, verso: ..ope giov../giovanni ..oop. (?)
black chalk heightened with white chalk on buff paper
Provenance
sale, London, Sotheby's, 15 June 1983, lot 27;
Muriel and Philip Berman, Allentown, USA
Exhibited
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, The Art of Paolo Veronese 1528-1588, 1988-89, cat. no. 50
Literature
The Genius of Venice, 1500-1600, exhibition catalogue, London, Royal Academy, 1983-84, p. 235;
R. Cocke, Veronese's Drawings, A Catalogue Raisonné, London 1984, p. 138, no. 55, reproduced;
L. L. Crosato, 'I Disegni di Paolo Veronese', in Arte Veneta, vol. 40, 1986, p. 253;
Veronese e Verona, exhibition catalogue, Verona, Museo di Castelvecchio, 1988, p. 233, reproduced, and p. 236 note 12;
W.R. Rearick, 'Black Chalk Drawings by Paolo Veronese', in Master Drawings, vol. 30, no. 2, 1992, p. 151, reproduced p. 152, fig. 10
Catalogue Note
This is a preliminary study for the central figure, and for the legs of the figure on the right, in Veronese's painting St. Barnabas Healing the Sick (fig. 1), executed for S. Giorgio in Braida, Verona and now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen (see T. Pignatti and F. Pedrocco, Veronese: Catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence 1991, p. 178, cat. no. 92). In his catalogue entry for the drawing in the Washington exhibition (see below), Rearick refers to a pen and ink sketch for the composition which Veronese then apparently rejected (Städelschen Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, no. 4461). The present study is in, as Rearick points out, 'Veronese's preferred medium for individual figure studies' and shows the figure almost exactly as it appears in the painting. There is a further related drawing, a splendid Head of Young Negro, in the Louvre (exhibition catalogue, Washington, no. 51). The subject is most unusual and shows St. Barnabas using the Gospel of St. Matthew to cure the sick in Cyprus. The dating of the painting has been debated by various scholars, but is now generally thought to be the late 1560s.