Giulio Romano

Although the figures in this sheet are wholly typical of Giulio Romano, until 1958 the drawing was attributed to a follower of Gaudenzio Ferrari, an error surely resulting from the work’s provenance. The sheet came from the so-called Abrate Album, a collection of drawings assembled in the early seventeenth century for the Dukes of Savoy. Antonella Chiodo’s research has revealed that the album was still intact when owned by Antonio Abrate in the early twentieth century, but sometime between 1927, when it was sold by his heirs, and 1950, the album was broken up and the sheets were sold individually. Janos Scholz acquired many sheets from the album, which consisted largely—but not exclusively—of drawings by artists from northwestern Italy.¹

In 1958, Pouncey recognized the drawing as Giulio’s work, an attribution never since questioned. He dated it to ca. 1520–24, when Giulio had assumed leadership of Raphael’s workshop after the master’s death and before Giulio departed for Mantua. Stylistically, the sheet has been compared to other drawings of the early 1520s, such as the Enthroned Pope Attended by Child Angels in the Victoria and Albert Museum (inv. 2296), a study for one of the popes frescoed in the corners of the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican.

Two of the Latin doctors of the church are depicted here: St. Jerome, kneeling with his common attributes of the lion and a cardinal’s hat, and a standing bishop saint who could be either St. Augustine or St. Ambrose. Although the drawing is highly finished and squared, it has never been connected with any of Giulio’s known projects.² The similarity of the figures to those in Giulio’s Holy Family and Saints altarpiece for the Fugger chapel in Santa Maria dell’Anima, Rome, a work executed in 1522–23, has often been noted, but this seems more a comparison of type than of particular style.³ Slavin’s suggestion that the attenuated figures resemble those of Giulio’s works in the 1530s, such as the Nativity with St. Longinus and St. John the Evangelist (Louvre, Paris), should not be ruled out entirely.⁴ Although Gere argues that the saints in this drawing were probably for a sacra conversazione,⁵ the way in which the figures gaze upward suggests that they could alternately be for some large composition intended for the apse of a church. During his years in Mantua, Giulio designed a number of such works that were actually executed by others— Francesco Torbido’s frescoes at the Verona cathedral or Michelangelo Anselmi’s at Santa Maria della Steccata in Parma—and the Morgan drawing could perhaps have been for a similar scheme, representing either a rejected idea or a never-executed project.

—JJM

Footnotes:

1. The Abrate Album may have been assembled as early as the seventeenth century, although the identifying stamp (L. 47a) was placed on the drawings only in the time of Tommaso Alberto Vittorio di Savoia-Genova, 12th Duke of Genova. The album was one of the most important collections of Piemontese drawings apart from those in the Biblioteca Reale and Accademia Albertina in Turin. The provenance for this and other drawings from the album has been most fully studied by Antonella Chiodo in her unpublished thesis, Ricerche sulla grafica gaudenziana. L’album Abrate, thesis of Post-Graduate Specialization in Beni Storici Artistici, University of Milan, 2012–13.
2. The squaring grid is drawn at intervals of approximately 13 millimeters. This is smaller than that usually found on drawings of the time, but it was a scale used in other drawings by Giulio.
3. The most complete discussion of this drawing, with an overview of debates on its date, is Homberg-Pinassi in New York 1999, no. 5.
4. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 421. See Slavin in Providence 1973, no. 25.
5. New York 1987, no. 65.