Timoteo Viti

Viti received his first artistic education in the workshop of the Bolognese painter Francesco Francia (see I, 94 and I, 95). Like his fellow Urbino native Raphael, he was also strongly influenced by Perugino and Pinturicchio, the predominant painters active in the Marche. Much discussion of Viti has nonetheless focused on his relationship to Raphael. Viti was thirteen years older than Raphael, but despite the suggestion by some scholars that Viti had been Raphael’s master, the younger painter was the stronger artistic personality. Viti traveled to Rome in 1510–13 and worked as one of Raphael’s assistants.

Although the present drawing seems always to have been attributed consistently to Viti, Rhoda Eitel-Porter observed during the research for this catalogue that the sheet is a cartoon for the head of Mary Magdalene in Viti’s Noli me Tangere. Furio Rinaldi subsequently dedicated an article to this and the other studies for the altarpiece.¹ Painted for the church of Sant’Angelo Minore in Cagli, a small town south of Urbino, the panel was probably done soon after Viti had returned there from Rome. The preparatory studies are also a reminder that Viti had access to Raphael’s drawings, as he used them as inspiration for this work. For the central figure of the altarpiece, for example, Viti relied on a figure of Mary Magdalene that Raphael devised for his Entombment (Galleria Borghese, Rome); Viti’s source was not the final painting, but rather one of Raphael’s preparatory drawings.² From this model, Viti then drew his own study for the figure of the Magdalen and also for the figure of Christ.³ Viti presumably then created the full-scale cartoon, of which the present sheet is a fragment. The drawing is incised for transfer, and it corresponds exactly in size to the finished work. This is, however, the only known cartoon by Viti, so it is not clear whether he regularly made use of full-scale drawings as preparation for his paintings.⁴

—JJM

Footnotes:

1. Rinaldi 2013. On the painting, see also Urbino 1983, 315–16.
2. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 3865. Viti is known to have owned this sheet; see Rinaldi 2013, 155. Rinaldi also notes that Raphael’s Agony in the Garden (see I, 15) was owned by Viti and was purchased by Fairfax Murray from Viti’s heirs.
3. The figure of Christ is in the Altaldi Collection of the Biblioteca Oliveriana, Pesaro, inv. 668. See Rinaldi 2013, 153–54.
4. On Viti as a draftsman, see also Ferino 1979, Forlani Tempesti 1998, Forlani Tempesti 2007, and La France 2015.