Attributed to Benedetto Diana

This drawing reveals a careful perspectival construction with stylus indentations and ruled guidelines for the tiled floor and the placement of the trestle table. The orthogonals—still visible—are drawn so as to meet at a point just below Christ’s hand, which is raised in blessing. The formal, frontal arrangement is further emphasized because, unusually for depictions of the Last Supper, the table is shown straight on from a low vantage point rather than from slightly above, emphasizing the narrow front edge of the table rather than its top. The ambitious study may thus be preparatory for an independent painting or fresco rather than for a predella panel. Its Eucharistic subject was a common one for refectories, and well-known, near-contemporary depictions of the Last Supper include Leonardo’s Milanese fresco, which was engraved as early as 1498 and was soon afterward known in Venice. The present composition, however, does not reveal the influence of Leonardo’s figures. A vignette depicting Christ washing the feet of the disciples is visible through an opening at upper left. Although this episode precedes the Last Supper in the Gospel of John, the two are rarely combined in one scene.¹ This detail further suggests that the drawing was for a large canvas or fresco rather than a small predella panel.

Combining elements of the drawing styles of Giovanni Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio, the drawing is undoubtedly by a Venetian artist of the late fifteenth century. It was catalogued as Bellini school by its former owner, Charles Fairfax Murray, in 1905. In appreciation of its quality, Philip Pouncey remarked in 1958, “[I]would not like to exclude Bellini,” but this opinion has not been shared by later scholars. The handling of the pen and brush and the figural types point nonetheless to a close follower of the artist.²

An attribution to Benedetto Diana was put forward by Fritz Heinemann in a publication of 1962, a suggestion supported by Roger Rearick. The latter, however, rightly noted that the only certain connected drawing by the artist, the Uffizi Head of an Apostle that is a study for the Assumption of the Virgin of ca. 1501 in Santa Maria della Croce, Crema, is a detail rather than a compositional study and is not directly comparable to the Morgan sheet.³ Although Diana may have been a pupil of Lazzaro Bastiani, he was above all influenced by Giovanni Bellini. He is first documented as a painter in 1482 in the registers of the Scuola Grande della Carità, Venice, and by 1484 he was receiving prestigious commissions, including one for a fresco for the Scuola Grande di San Marco. By 1505 he was among the foremost artists in Venice.

Although less ambitious in spatial organization, two paintings attributed to Benedetto Diana kindly brought to our attention by Christopher Corradino echo the overall composition and some figural details of the present study. First is a painting said to bear the date 1507 and Benedetto Diana’s signature that was sold in Vienna in 1906 (Last Supper, whereabouts unknown).⁴ A later variant of this composition, apparently signed by Francesco da Santacroce, son and collaborator of the Bellini follower Girolamo da Santacroce, is in the refectory of the Franciscan monastery of the Holy Cross on the Croatian island of Kranpanj. The second painting by Diana, the present location of which is also unknown, is recorded in a photograph in the Archivio Antonio Morassi of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Venice. A handwritten note on the back of the photograph—presumably by Morassi himself—names Benedetto Diana as the creator and the Room of the Lantern in the Palazzo Reale in Milan as the location, but no such painting has been traced there. Although not one of the figures or details corresponds exactly, the two Last Suppers share with the Morgan drawing the general disposition of the figures at a long rectangular trestle table with Christ seated at center and St. John asleep by his side.

A faithful copy after the Morgan sheet, in brown ink and wash over red chalk, is preserved in the British Museum. According to Martin Royalton-Kisch, the latter’s Rembrandtesque quality suggests the Morgan study was in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, although a Rembrandt pupil could possibly have seen it elsewhere. He further notes that Rembrandt himself collected fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian drawings.⁵

—REP

Footnotes:

1. The combined motif does appear in a Last Supper by Girolamo da Santacroce in the church of San Martino, Burano, but that painting is later, from around 1549.
2. As noted by John Marciari, the recent reattribution to Vittore Carpaccio of the Supper at Emmaus in San Salvador, Venice, should also be taken into consideration, as both the figure types and the drawing’s brushwork recall some of Carpaccio’s work.
3. Oral communication, 2001. Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. 14633f. See Sartor 2001, 113–14.
4. Prince Heinrich von Bourbon sale, Hirschler’s, Vienna, 2 April 1906, lot 41. See Paolucci 1966, 14.