Saint Luke seated with his ox nearby

The style of this drawing is that of one of the towering figures of sixteenth-century art in Antwerp, Frans Floris, but it must be a copy by one of Floris’s numerous workshop assistants after a lost drawing by the master. Several other depictions by Floris of the evangelist exist, among which stand out a painting at the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (inv. 114; see E.H. Wouk, Frans Floris (1619/20-1570). Imagining a Northern Renaissance, Leiden and Boston, 2018, pp. 167-172, fig. 5.11, pp. 592-593, no. P.108), a possibly related drawing in the Kunstsammlung der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (inv. H 254; see G. Unverfehrt in Zeichnungen von Meisterhand. Die Sammlung Uffenbach aus der Kunstsammlung der Universität Göttigen, exhib. cat., Koblenz, Mittelrhein-Museum, Göttingen, Kunstsammlung der Universität, and Oldenburg, Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kunstgeschichte, 2000, no. 22, ill.), and a series of four engravings representing the Evangelists (E.H. Wouk, Frans Floris, Ouderkerk aan den IJssel, 2011, I, nos. 48-51, ill.). The drawing by Floris on which the present sheet was based may have been part of a series depicting all four Evangelists with their traditional attributes. Floris’s composition may have been inspired by an engraving by Agostino Veneziano after Giulio Romano, in which the saint also turns his back to the viewer, and which is also one of part of such a series (A. Bartsch, Le Peintre graveur, XIV, Vienna, 1813, pp. 83-84, nos. 92-95).