Fra Paolino

Although Fairfax Murray attributed the drawing to Fra Bartolommeo, Berenson correctly identified it as a work of Fra Paolino in the second edition of The Drawings of the Florentine Painters.¹ As Berenson observed, the drawing is a modello for Fra Paolino’s altarpiece, formerly in the convent of Santa Caterina in Cafaggio, and probably commissioned ca. 1526 before the artist resettled in Pistoia.² Both the drawing and painting depend upon Fra Bartolomeo’s 1511 altarpiece of the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Siena, painted for the church of San Marco, Florence.³ In his version, Fra Paolino made several deviations from his source, including the number, identities and poses of the attending saints.

The Morgan sheet corresponds very closely to Fra Paolino’s finished altarpiece, although in the latter Saint Antoninus has been inserted behind the figure of Christ, and between those of Saint Dominic and the Virgin Mary. A pentimento in the drawing occupies almost exactly the same position as Antoninus in the painting. Other differences include the direction of Saint Dominic’s gaze, which in the altarpiece is directed toward the infant Christ, and the form of the uppermost step of the dais upon which the Virgin is enthroned.

Fra Bartolommeo evidently favored Fra Paolino. Two now-lost documents precisely inventory the extensive list of Fra Bartolommeo’s possessions – including over a thousand of his drawings – which passed to Fra Paolino after the former’s death.⁴ As the Morgan drawing shows, Fra Paolino took advantage of his access to the master’s example, which, for a time, he reproduced closely. In the second edition of his Vite (1568), Giorgio Vasari records that Fra Bartolommeo’s drawings had, by that time, passed to “a nun who paints” (una monaca che dipigne), the prioress of the convent of Santa Caterina di Siena, Florence.⁵ The artist and prioress in question, Polissena de’ Nelli, took the name Suor Plautilla when she became a nun in 1538 at the age of fourteen.⁶ Though it has sometimes been claimed, it is very unlikely that she worked with Fra Paolino, who returned to Pistoia ca. 1526, leaving behind the workshop consignment.⁷ The drawings passed from Fra Paolino to Suor Plautilla and remained in the convent until the eighteenth century, when the Florentine collector Cavaliere Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburi was alerted to their existence by Vasari's account. Gabburri purchased the drawings from the nuns by 1725 and, in 1729, had them bound together in two large albums lettered M and N, respectively.⁸ These two albums contain a small number of drawings by Fra Bartolommeo’s pupils, including one by Fra Paolino.⁹ That Gabburri also owned the Morgan drawing is shown by the inscription in his hand on the sheet’s verso. Furthermore, the Morgan drawing bears an anonymous collector’s mark featuring a bird (L. 2818), which is found on forty-one drawings in Albums M and N. Fritz Lugt was the first to point out that the mark is often fragmented, suggesting that the drawings were marked before they were mounted in the albums. It is not known whether the Morgan sheet was originally bound in one of Gabburri’s albums and, if so, when it became separated. Gabburri’s collection was purchased in 1758-60 by the English art dealer William Kent, who sold much of it in London in 1760-62, with further sales of his property occurring in 1766 and 1767.¹⁰ It is possible that the Morgan sheet too travelled to London before entering the collection of George Skene, who is also known to have owned at least one drawing by Fra Bartolommeo.¹¹

Drawings so close in style to Fra Bartolommeo may be dated to fairly early in Fra Paolino’s career, his later works betraying the profound influence of a younger generation of Florentine artists, such as Rosso Fiorentino.

Footnotes:

1. Berenson 1938, 2: 252, no. 1827b.
2. Deposits of the Gallerie Fiorentine, Florence, inv. 1890 n.3471. See Florence 1996, no. 81.
3. Louvre, Paris, inv. 97.
4. Elen, in Rotterdam 2016, 43.
5. Vasari 1878-85, 4: 195, 5: 79-80.
6. For Plautilla Nelli, see Fiesole 2000, Nelson 2008, and Florence 2017.
7. Elen, in Rotterdam 2016, 44. To strengthen the hypothesis that the drawings were left in Florence, Elen points out that the collection contains a number of drawings by Giovanni Antonio Sogliani, who painted a fresco in the convent of Santa Caterina di Siena in 1536.
8. Ibid., 45-46. As Elen notes, the negotiations over the purchase seem to have been underway by 1722. The albums are now conserved in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. The sheets were removed from the albums in 1988-90. Gabburi also purchased from the nuns forty-six landscape drawings, which he believed to be by Andrea del Sarto, now also attributed to Fra Bartolommeo. These too were mounted in an album (lettered B). The album was dismantled and sold at auction at Sotheby’s, London, 20 November 1957. By that time it contained forty-one sheets. See Rotterdam 2016, 49-50. Gabburri had previously bound many of his other drawings into similarly lettered albums. For some of these, see Turner, in London 2003, 190-91.
9. Elen, in Rotterdam 2016, 48-49.
10. Ibid., 51. Turner, in London 2002, 196; Turner 1993, 187, note 5.
11. British Museum, London, inv. 1910-2-12-11.