Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus

Prof. Albert B. Friedman, Claremont, California,
by whom sold, New York, Sotheby's Parke-Bernet, 22 October 1970, lot 111

D. van Sasse van Ysselt, 'Een serie tekeningen van Johannes Stradanus met scenes uit het leven van de Heilige Giovanni Gualberto' in Oud Holland, no.101/3 1987, p. 154, reproduced fig. 12;
A.B. Vannucci, Jan van der Straet detto Giovanni Stradano, flandrus pictor et inventor, Milan 1997, p. 223, cat. no. 208, reproduced 

Born in Bruges, Johannes van der Straet, called Stradanus, was among the most singular foreign artists working in 16^th century Italy.  He studied under Pieter Aertsen in Antwerp in 1537, joining the Guild of St. Luke in the city in 1545.  He subsequently travelled to Italy and settled in Florence, where he designed tapestry cartoons for Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici.  In the early 1550s Stradanus went to Rome, where he worked with Francesco Salviati, whose style influenced him greatly.

Back in Florence, Stradanus joined Giorgio Vasari's équipe, assisting with the decorations of the Palazzo Vecchio, which he continued to do independently into the 1570s.  By this time, his style combined Vasari and Tintoretto's figural idioms with a typically northern European interest in naturalistic and topographical detail.  Between 1567 and 1577, he designed cartoons for the Hunting Scene tapestry for Cosimo's villa at Poggio a Caiano near Florence.  These were so successful that he executed two further series which were published as engravings by printmakers in Antwerp. 

The present drawing was identified by Dr. van Sasse van Ysselt as one of a group of preparatory studies for a series of engravings illustrating the life of San Giovanni Gualberto of Florence.  The saint is best-known as an influential reformer and the founder of the Vallombrosan Order; there was a notable revival of his cult in Florence during the time of the Counter-Reformation.  It is not known who commissioned the series, although in all likelihood, the patron was Florentine.  The commission may have been connected with the official establishment in 1595 of the saint's feast day as the twelfth of July.

Vanucci compares the series stylistically to Stradanus' extraordinary series of drawings representing Dante's Divine Comedy, conserved in the Laurentian Library, Florence, and suggests a date of circa 1590.¹  This period of work is marked by a transition from a Mannerist to an early Baroque idiom, with genre-like interpretations of religious themes, more lucidly structured compositions and large, plastic figures set in clearly defined space. 

Other extant drawings in the series are preserved in the Louvre, Paris, the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, and the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.²  The drawings were never engraved as a set, but independent prints of two of the compositions were issued at a later date.  Impressions of these are preserved in the library of the abbey at Vallombrosa.

1. A.B. Vannucci, op.cit., p. 220