Taddeo ZUCCARO

This is a study for what is arguably Taddeo Zuccaro’s most important surviving work, the fresco decoration of the Mattei Chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Consolazione in Rome, painted between 1553 and 1556. The decoration of the small chapel was the result of a commission from the nobleman Jacopo Mattei, who several years earlier had engaged the young Zuccaro to paint the façade of the Palazzo Mattei in Rome. As the 16th century painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari records, ‘M. Jacopo Mattei, having caused a chapel to be built in the Church of the Consolazione below the Campidoglio, allotted it to Taddeo to paint, knowing already how able he was; and he willingly undertook to do it, and for a small price, in order to show certain persons, who went about saying that he could do nothing save façades and other works in chiaroscuro, that he could also paint in colour. Having then set his hand to that work, Taddeo would only touch it when he was in the mood and vein to do well, spending the rest of his time on works that did not weigh upon him so much in the matter of honour; and so he executed it at his leisure in four years…The whole work, which was uncovered in the year 1556, when Taddeo was not more than twenty-six years of age, as held, as it still is, to be extraordinary, and he was judged by the craftsmen at that time to be an excellent painter.’ Zuccaro must have produced a large number of preparatory drawings for this important and extensive commission, but only a few are known today. 

This drawing is an early preparatory study for one of the four Evangelists painted by Zuccaro on the pendentives of the vault of the Mattei Chapel, as noted by Vasari: ‘on the vaulting, about certain ornaments in stucco, are four half-length figures representing the Four Evangelists, which are very beautiful.’ The pendentives are very damaged today, and only three of them are still reasonably legible. Since the frescoed Evangelists are half-length figures, this squared drawing of a full-length seated figure of Saint Luke, as Gere has noted, ‘can reasonably be identified as a discarded design for one of the pendentives on the entrance-wall’ of the chapel. Another preparatory drawing for the same pendentive figure of Saint Luke, which also shows the figure full-length and is very similar in stylistic terms to the present sheet, is in the collection of the Archdiocesan Museum in Kroměříž in the Czech Republic.

Four other preparatory drawings by Taddeo Zuccaro related to the Evangelists in the Mattei Chapel are known. A drawing for the full-length pendentive figure of Saint John is in the Louvre, while a pen and wash study of a half-length figure of Saint Matthew with an Angel appears on the verso of a drawing in the Uffizi in Florence. What seems to be another early study for the Saint Matthew pendentive is in the collection of the Kunsthaus in Zurich. A sheet of red chalk figure studies of full-length Evangelists, on the verso of a drawing of a sibyl in a private collection, may also be related to the Mattei Chapel pendentives. As Julian Brooks has pointed out, based on the surviving drawings for the pendentives, ‘it is obvious that Taddeo initially wished to portray the evangelists full-length, although in the end he decided to show only their upper bodies and heads. Taddeo’s struggles to overcome the problem of showing the full body from below – while keeping the head visible and including an attribute… – are evident.’ Certainly, the visually striking pose of the Evangelist in the present sheet, like those of the saints in the related drawings in the Louvre and in Kroměříž, is quite different from the much more restrained half-length figures that were eventually frescoed in the chapel.

Among stylistically comparable drawings by Taddeo Zuccaro is a study of an angel seated on a cloud, likewise drawn in pen and brown ink and wash on blue paper, in the collection of the Raclin Murphy (formerly Snite) Museum at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and a drawing of Saint Paul Restoring Eutychus to Life in the same technique, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Also similar in medium and technique is a drawing of Two Youths Asleep in a Landscapein the Kunsthaus in Zurich, which is a study for another fresco in the Mattei Chapel, as well as a Seated Sibyl in the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg and a drawing of a Roman soldier in the Biblioteca National in Rio de Janeiro, both of which can also be related to the same commission.

The studies of arms and torsos drawn in brown ink on the verso of the present sheet may likewise be tentatively related to the Mattei Chapel decorations, and in particular the vault fresco of The Arrest of Christ. When the sheet is turned 180 degrees, the study of a bent arm near the top edge of the verso can perhaps be regarded as a first idea for the arm of Saint Peter, holding a knife and attacking the fallen Roman soldier Malchus, near the centre of the painted composition. This figure also appears in Taddeo’s more elaborate compositional drawing for the fresco of The Arrest of Christ, in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin. 

The first recorded owner of the present sheet was the Reverend John Sanford (1775-1855), who lived in Florence for much of the 1830s, and was among the foremost English collectors of Italian paintings in the first half of the 19th century.