Andrea Vicentino

Acquired from Parsons, October 1910 (as Alonso Cano)

London, Royal Academy, The Paul Oppé Collection, 1958, no. 354 (as Attributed to El Greco)

E. Tietze-Conrat, Art Quarterly, III, 1940, p. 22-6, reproduced;
H. Tietze and E. Tietze-Conrat, The Drawings of the Venetian Painters in the 15th and 16th Centuries, New York 1970, p. 180, no. 747, pl. CXXX, reproduced (as possibly by El Greco);
H.E. Wethey, El Greco and his School, Princeton 1962, p. 153 (as Venetian, second half of the sixteenth century);
D. Angulo and A.E. Perez Sanchez, A Corpus of Spanish Drawings, 1400-1600, London 1975, p. 44 (as not by El Greco);
The Katalan Collection of Italian Drawings, exhib. cat., Poughkeepsie, Vassar College, et al., 1995-96, p. 48;
W.R. Rearick, Il disegno Veneziano de Cinquecento, Milan 2001, p. 199-200 (as Vicentino, circa 1576)

Hinge mounted by the lower edge to an old sheet of paper. There is an old horizontal crease running across the centre of the sheet and a further horizontal crease circa 20mm from the lower edge. There are a number of small nicks to the edges, most notably to the left half of the lower edge. The sheet has discolored very slightly and there is evidence of surface dirt throughout and some areas of staining to the left half of the upper edge and the upper right edge. The red chalk medium remains frsh and vibrant throughout this highly energetic sheet.
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Executed by the Venetian Andrea Vicentino, this drawing is an important record of several paintings by Jacopo Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese -- arguably Venice's finest artists of the late 16th Century -- two of which were destroyed by fire at a very early date.

On the left hand side of the recto, we see Veronese's Federico Barbarossa Receiving the Antipope Octavian, while the right half records Tintoretto's Excommunication of Federico Barbarossa.  Both these paintings were commissioned for the Palazzo Ducale, but were destroyed in 1577.  The sketches on the verso are also based on six paintings from the Palazzo Ducale, all of which were executed by Veronese, and can still be seen today on the ceiling of the Sala del Collegio. These represent: Religio and Fides, Venetia between Justitia and Pax, Fidelity, Prosperity, Vigilance and Mars and Neptune.

Given that the two works copied by Vicentino on the recto were destroyed in 1577, and that the six works after Veronese on the verso are documented as being executed between 1575 and January 1577, the present drawing by Vicentino can be dated with some precision between 1575 and 1577.