Giorgio Vasari Saint Mark

Saint Mark the Evangelist

Pen and brown ink
140 x 220 mm. (5 ½ x 8 ¾ in.)

Provenance
Nathaniel Hone (1718-1784), London (Lugt 2793); John Skippe (1742-1811), his mount and attribution, Fiorentina Scuola / anon; by descent through the family to Mrs. Rayner Wood (d. 1955); by descent to Mr. Edward Holland Martin (d. 1958), his sale, London, Christie’s, 21 November 1958, lot 71c (as attributed to Battista Franco by A.E. Popham); Private collection.

This vivid pen drawing of an elegantly reclining figure of Saint Mark the Evangelist, as yet unpublished, is a welcome addition to Giorgio Vasari’s graphic oeuvre. It was surely made for a specific project, but it is not, apparently, linked to a known or documented painting. Its characteristic pen style, revealing fine parallel- and cross-hatching to elaborate the figure and the draperies, points to a relatively early period in Vasari’s career. Comparable pen drawings, executed without any brown wash, are typical of the later 1530s and particularly the 1540s. Examples of this type, showing a similarly vigorous handling of the pen, are a Holy Family in the Louvre¹, another Holy Family in a private collection², and the Holy Kinship in the Albertina, Vienna³. At far right, the Vienna drawing features a male figure very close in type and character to the present one. Even closer in style and subject matter, however, is a drawing of Saint Matthew the Evangelist in the Louvre, which cannot be linked to any extant painting⁴.

Vasari employed reclining figures inscribed in long horizontal fields, often assuming highly twisted and outstretched poses, throughout his career. Typically, they were destined for panel paintings or frescoes as part of larger ceiling decorations, and their subject matter included Sibyls, prophets, personifications of the Four Seasons as well as various male and female Virtues⁵. Vasari depicted the four Evangelists on several occasions in his career: as standing apostles in his panels for the decoration of the sacristy of S. Giovanni Carbonara, Naples (1545)⁶; as seated pairs above the arch of the Del Monte chapel in S. Pietro in Montorio, Rome (1550-52)⁷; again in pairs of seated figures in lunettes in two drawings in the Uffizi⁸. Two reclining Evangelists in the act of writing feature in an early design in the Louvre for Vasari’s family chapel in the Pieve, Arezzo (circa 1560)⁹; and they appear seated and inscribed in ovals in two designs at Montpellier and the Victoria and Albert Museum for the ceiling decorations of two unidentified chapels¹⁰. Towards the end of his career, in 1570-71, Vasari depicted the Evangelists, upright and seated, in four panels as part of the now-dispersed decoration of the Cappella di San Michele in the Vatican¹¹.

In the present drawing, Saint Mark, accompanied by his customary lion, is shown reading a book apparently resting on a cloud. This suggests that the figure was intended for an elevated position, most likely as part of a chapel decoration. In January 1548, Vasari frescoed the main chapel of the church of the Olivetan monastery of S. Maria Scolca at Rimini, for which he had just finished a vast tripartite altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi, now divided between the church of S. Fortunato and a private collection¹². Vasari’s complex fresco decoration is now lost but it included, in addition to figures of Dante, Virgil, Orpheus and Homer, prophets and Sibyls and the four Evangelists, all life-size. While the appearance of the Scolca frescoes, clearly Vasari’s most ambitious chapel decoration thus far, is unknown, and no securely related drawings have come down to us, a connection with the present study is not inconceivable, although it must remain, until the emergence of further evidence, conjectural. The style and handling of our drawing suggests, however, a dating to about that period, circa 1545-50.

John Skippe, the eighteenth-century collector and chiaroscuro wood engraver after Old Masters who owned our sheet, correctly considered it to be Florentine¹³. In his 1958 sales catalogue of the Skippe collection, A.E. Popham, then Keeper of the British Museum print room, suggested instead an attribution to the Venetian draughtsman Battista Franco, whose fine and regular pen style is indeed reminiscent of Vasari’s. In arriving at his attribution, Popham may well have had a drawing of a Prophet in the British Museum in mind, then also considered to be by Franco¹⁴. However, as Alessandro Cecchi subsequently established, the British Museum Prophet was in fact a study by Vasari for his altarpiece of the Immaculate Conception at Lucca of 1543. It, too, is close in style and handling to the present drawing.

After training in the workshop of Andrea del Sarto and Baccio Bandinelli, Vasari began his career as an independent painter in the late 1520s. In the 1530s he enjoyed the patronage of various members of the Medici family, working mainly in Florence and Tuscany. Under the influence of the works of Raphael and his school at Rome, where Vasari stayed for several months in 1538, and at Bologna in 1539-40, where he studied Parmigianino, Vasari developed a modern, lighter style, or maniera, that was ideally suited for the often vast fresco decorations his largely aristocratic clientele demanded of him. Together with his coeval friend, Francesco Salviati, whose style was developed along the same models, Vasari spread this new maniera from Northern Italy to Naples.  In 1541-42, he spent about eight months at Venice. Throughout the 1540s Vasari worked in Tuscany, Naples, Rome and Rimini, among other places. In Rome he completed the Sala dei Cento Giorni for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, his largest decorative project to date. In 1550 Vasari designed and painted the funerary chapel for the family of Pope Julius III del Monte in S. Pietro in Montorio, arguably his most successful chapel decoration. In 1555 Vasari settled permanently in Florence and entered the service of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. His foremost achievement in Florence was the transformation of the Palazzo Vecchio, the old seat of the Florentine Republic, into a modern ducal residence, a project that took about seventeen years to complete. Vasari also built the Uffizi and led the modernisation and decoration of the leading mendicant churches of S. Croce and S. Maria Novella. In the later 1560s Vasari received important commissions from Pope Pius V and, after his unexpected death in 1572, from his successor, Pope Gregory XIII, most notably the vast altar of the Last Judgement for S. Croce at Bosco Marengo, the hometown of Pope Pius V, and the completion of the Sala Regia in the Vatican.  Vasari’s last, and perhaps greatest, project at Florence, the cupola frescoes in the church of S. Maria del Fiore, remained unfinished upon his death, which occurred only two months after that of his lord, Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, whom Vasari had served for twenty years. Federico Zuccaro subsequently completed the cupola frescoes.

1  F. Härb, The Drawings of Giorgio Vasari, 1510-1574, Rome, 2015, no. 84, illustrated.   

2  Ibid., no. 86, illustrated.
3 Ibid., no. 93, illustrated. The drawing was reworked with wash and white heightening by another hand, probably in the seventeenth century.
4  Ibid., no. 94, illustrated.
5  Ibid., nos. 205, 211, 225, 231 278, all illustrated.
6  Ibid., no. 127, illustrated.
7  Ibid., no. 154, illustrated.
8  Ibid., nos. 179-80.
9  Ibid., no. 319, illustrated.
10  Ibid., no. 212-13, both illustrated.
11  Ibid., pp. 584-85, figs. 1-4.
12  Ibid., under no. 136, figs. 136.1-3.
13 For Skippe see also, I. Fleming-Williams, 'John Skippe: Notes on his Life and Travels,' Master Drawings, III, 1965,     pp. 268-75.
14  Härb, op. cit., no. 71, illustrated.