Veronese

The energetic draftsmanship of this sheet is typical of Veronese’s preparatory studies, which often feature figures drawn multiple times in slightly different poses and use multiple layers of wash to accentuate and refine a preferred solution from among those poses.¹ In this case, the drawing relates to several paintings of the Finding of Moses executed around 1580; the studies are for the figures of Pharaoh’s daughter (standing upright with her left leg bent) and for two attendants, one who stands alongside the princess and another who presents the newly discovered infant.

Most of the previous discussion of this drawing has focused on its relationship to the numerous paintings of the subject executed by Veronese and his workshop in the early 1580s. A small Finding of Moses, of which there are versions in the Prado and the National Gallery of Art, is clearly related. Richard Cocke, however, who focused on the sketches of Pharaoh’s daughter at the right side of the sheet, where she is shown pointing, related the drawing primarily to a lost painting by Veronese known through a copy by Sebastiano Ricci and a chiaroscuro woodcut by John Baptist Jackson.² Rearick also later emphasized the connections with the lost painting and argued that the drawing related most closely to it, concluding that the lost painting must have been executed before the Madrid and Washington paintings.³ Virtually all previous scholars have argued, moreover, that the Prado version of the painting was made before the Washington version.⁴

Much of the above line of reasoning can, nonetheless, be overturned. The canvas in Washington has been relatively little studied by scholars in recent decades because it was assumed to be a version made by Veronese or his workshop after the Prado painting. Yet the recent cleaning and examination of the Washington canvas has revealed it to be not only a work of much higher quality than previously thought but also perhaps the original painted version of the composition. The figures at the far right of the canvas, for example, are now known to have been painted atop the woman in the striped dress beside the princess, something unlikely to have happened in a second version. Turning to the Morgan drawing, furthermore, it must be noted that the direction and strength of the light and shadow (the attendant in shadow but with her head poking into the light, or the fall of light on the drapery study at the center of the sheet), the pose of Pharaoh’s daughter emphasizing her bent left knee, and especially the construction of her dress, with a distinct X-shape across her torso, relate directly to the Washington painting. The dress in the Washington version, however, has been repainted—it was originally closer to the dress in the Prado version—which complicates matters. It is probable that the Washington and Madrid paintings were actually created simultaneously in the studio, as Joanna Dunn has suggested.⁵

As noted above, it was Veronese’s common practice to draw multiple versions of a figure and then apply wash to refine his preferred solution and distinguish it from the other sketches on the page. He would, however, sometimes return to a sheet to select alternate versions for later paintings of the same subject. This is likely what happened with the Morgan drawing: the structure of the princess’s dress matches the Washington painting, implying that the drawing was made for that work, but the figure’s gestures in the studies at right are closer to the lost version known in Ricci’s copy, suggesting that Veronese returned to the sheet for this second composition. When Veronese was commissioned to paint a horizontal version of the composition a few years later (a painting now in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin), he would likely have returned to this sheet as inspiration even as he made the additional studies on the sheets now at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge,⁶ and at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.⁷

—JJM

Footnotes:

1. For a recent summary of Veronese as a draftsman, see Marciari 2012a.
2. Cocke 1984, 242–43; the lost painting and Ricci’s copy are fully discussed in Coutts 1982.
3. Rearick in Washington 1988a, no. 73.
4. In addition to the sources already cited, see Pignatti and Pedrocco 1995, 394–95, Brown 1989, 120–21, and Salomon 2014, 161.
5. I am grateful to Joanna Dunn for sharing her work on the Washington painting with me. For our more complete discussion of the implications of those findings with respect to both the Morgan drawing and the Washington and Madrid paintings, see Dunn and Marciari 2019.
6. Inv. pd.21-1997. See Scrase 2011, 667–68.
7. Inv. 1987.24.4a. See Venice 2014–15, no. 29; see also New York and Washington 2018–19, 42–44, 187–88, no. 13.