Piero Buonacorsi, PERINO DEL VAGA

This small drawing was first attributed to Perino del Vaga by Paul Joannides in 2000, and published by him four years later. The drawing, which would appear to depict a scene from Roman history, is unconnected to any surviving painting or fresco by the artist. Although Joannides had identified the subject of this drawing as Caesar Crossing the Rubicon, Dominique Cordellier has recently recognized that the composition in fact depicts Caesar on the River Aoös, another episode from the Civil War. The river Aoös (also called the Anius or Aoüs), which flows through Greece and Albania, is here personified by a river god reclining at the lower left of the composition.

A closely related drawing appears on the recto of a double-sided sheet of small compositional sketches and figure studies by Perino del Vaga formerly in the Reynolds, Calando and Lebel collections and today in the collection of Georges Pébereau in Paris. The lower sketch on the recto of the Pébereau sheet is clearly preparatory for the composition of the drawing here under discussion, and the two are very similar in size and scale, with the sketch on the former measuring approximately 136 x 182 mm. The present sheet must have been worked up from the preliminary sketch on the Pébereau drawing, although there may have been other, intervening studies.

While the sketch of Caesar on the River Aoös on the Pébereau drawing shows Perino at his lightest and most fluent, the present sheet is a carefully worked-up modello, with strong and decisive line-work. The differences in the composition of this drawing and that in the Pébereau collection mainly involve the placement of the figures, notably the oarsman and the master of the boat, while the empty stern of the boat in the later drawing serves as a visual platform for the gestures of Caesar’s astonished soldiers. The forms are carefully modelled with white heightening, delicately and precisely applied with the tip of the brush, which serves to emphasize the relief nature of the composition. The overall effect is inspired by Roman sarcophagus reliefs, and it would seem likely that this drawing was intended for a relief-like composition, probably in grisaille.

While the dating of the present sheet is difficult to establish with any precision – not unusual in the work of an artist whose graphic chronology remains notoriously unstable – it would seem to have been made fairly early in Perino’s career. Joannides has suggested that the present sheet was drawn before Perino’s move to Genoa in 1527. The closest analogies in style and technique are with such drawings of the early 1520’s by Perino as the Scene of Pillage in the Devonshire collection at Chatsworth and the Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand in the Albertina, in which the application of heightening in white bodycolour is closely comparable.

This visual sophistication evident in the design of this drawing of Caesar on the River Aoös, and the related sketches of Caesarian narratives on the Pébereau sheet of studies, would suggest that the unknown project for which they were preparatory was the result of a commission from a patron of refined taste and knowledge, perhaps someone at the papal court in Rome. Such a frieze of scenes from the life of Caesar can well be imagined as an apt decorative scheme for the façade or interior of a Roman palace.