CARLO MARATTI | RECTO: STUDY FOR JAEL AND SISERA; VERSO: STUDY OF JAEL

Sir Kenneth Clark (later Lord Kenneth Clark of Saltwood), London;

sale, London, Sotheby's, 20 April 1967, lot 12;

acquired by the Minnamurra Foundation in 1975,

gifted to the Bruce & Joy Reid Foundation in 1983

N. Turner, Italian Drawings in the British Museum, Roman Baroque Drawings, London 1999, p.132, under no.185, note 4

Both sides of this vigorous black chalk drawing are studies for the mosaic of Jael and Sisera, which occupies the right hand section of the lunette of the altar wall in the Cappella della Presentazione in St Peter's, Rome, (fig.1) forming part of the extensive mosaic decoration of the upper walls and cupola carried out to the designs of Maratti on the order of Pope Clement X, Altieri.

As discussed by Nicholas Turner (loc. cit.) the entire commission occupied Maratti intermittently from circa 1675 until his death in 1713 and was one of his most prolonged undertakings. Most of Maratti’s work for Jael and Sisera seems to have occupied him for only a relatively short period, around 1685,¹ but this did not prevent the artist from creating a large corpus of drawings for the project, a number of which survive. Indeed, significant individual sheets, as well as small groups of drawings relating to the project are housed in The Royal Collection, Windsor, the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, the British Museum, London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.²

Many of the more elaborate studies to survive for this project are executed in pen and wash, such as the fine sheet in the British Museum. Chalk studies of this quality are far more unusual, with the present work more accomplished and elaborate than other chalk drawings in The Royal Collection and Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. The robust, vigorous handling of the media in our drawing is typical of Maratti’s graphic style at this moment in his career, circa 1685, when the artist was in the midst of receiving some of his most celebrated commissions, including his altarpiece for the Cybo chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo, depicting St. John the Evangelist Disputing the subject of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin with the Church Fathers, SS Gregory, John Chrysostom and Augustine.³

For an in-depth discussion of Maratti’s Jael and Sisera as well as a more comprehensive listing of the various surviving drawings for the project see N. Turner, Italian Drawings in the British Museum, Roman Baroque Drawings, London 1999, pp.131-3, no.185.

1. Turner, op. cit., p. 132

2. The Royal Collection, Windsor, inv. nos. RCIN 904103, 904161 and 904435; Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, inv. nos. D-0606-08 and D-0609-11; British Museum, London, inv. no. Pp,5.126; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 36.101.2

3. See A. Sutherland Harris, Seventeenth-Century Art and Architecture, London 2005, p. 126, fig. 1.127, reproduced