Taddeo ZUCCARO

The kneeling pose of the figure shown twice in red chalk on the recto of the present sheet is similar to that of figure of Christ in Taddeo Zuccaro's ceiling painting of The Washing of the Feet of the Disciples, part of the fresco decoration of the Mattei Chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Consolazione in Rome, painted between 1553 and 1556 and the artist's most significant surviving work.

As John Gere has noted of the present sheet, ‘On the verso, the gesture of Jupiter’s right hand suggests that he is about to hurl his thunderbolt. An eagle with the same curiously long neck is the attribute of St. John the Evangelist in a study [in the Louvre] for one of the pendentives in the Mattei chapel.’ The verso of the sheet also includes, at the lower right, a landscape with a praying saint, visible when the sheet is turned vertically. As Gere points out, ‘The slight sketch of a landscape, with a kneeling St. Jerome (?) is exceptional in [Taddeo Zuccaro’s] work, and may be a copy of a painting or drawing of an earlier period.’