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Lot Essay
This powerful drawing is an outstanding example of Taddeo Zuccaro’s draftsmanship from the early years of his career. In 1553 the Roman nobleman Jacopo Mattei entrusted Taddeo with the decoration of a small chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Consolazione in Rome (J.A. Gere, Taddeo Zuccaro. His Development Studied in his Drawings, Chicago, 1969, pp. 57-62). According to Vasari, Zuccaro accepted the commission in exchange for a very low payment in the hope of demonstrating his skills as a painter and establishing his reputation in Rome. Taddeo worked slowly on the project for about four years, devoting his energies to it only when he was ‘inspired to do well’. His painstaking work on the decoration of the chapel paid off and the frescoes established the artist as one of the main protagonists of the Roman artistic scene of the time.
A large number of drawings related to the project survive. They attest to the artist’s concern with creating carefully studied groups and individual figures that could be admired individually even outside the context of the painted decoration, as noted by John Gere (ibid., pp. 59-60). The figure of the seated man on this sheet appears in the lower right corner of the Last Supper in one of the compartments on the chapel’s vault (fig. 1). A figure seated in an almost identical pose occurs on another sheet, a study for one of the shepherds in an Adoration, first recognized as the work of Taddeo by Noël Annesley and soon after published by Gere (‘Addenda and Corrigenda’, Master Drawings, XXXIII, no. 3, Autumn 1995, no. 264K).
The present study, drawn in black chalk and brown wash and expressively heightened with white, is executed on paper prepared with a warm yellow wash, a technique similar to that found in other studies for the same commission, and in particular in the study for a group of kneeling women in the Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, Rome (inv. FC 125685; see S. Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Disegni Romani dal XVI al XVIII secolo, Rome, 1995, no. 26, ill.).
Fig. 1. Taddeo Zuccaro, The Last Supper. Santa Maria della Consolazione, Rome.
A large number of drawings related to the project survive. They attest to the artist’s concern with creating carefully studied groups and individual figures that could be admired individually even outside the context of the painted decoration, as noted by John Gere (ibid., pp. 59-60). The figure of the seated man on this sheet appears in the lower right corner of the Last Supper in one of the compartments on the chapel’s vault (fig. 1). A figure seated in an almost identical pose occurs on another sheet, a study for one of the shepherds in an Adoration, first recognized as the work of Taddeo by Noël Annesley and soon after published by Gere (‘Addenda and Corrigenda’, Master Drawings, XXXIII, no. 3, Autumn 1995, no. 264K).
The present study, drawn in black chalk and brown wash and expressively heightened with white, is executed on paper prepared with a warm yellow wash, a technique similar to that found in other studies for the same commission, and in particular in the study for a group of kneeling women in the Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, Rome (inv. FC 125685; see S. Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Disegni Romani dal XVI al XVIII secolo, Rome, 1995, no. 26, ill.).
Fig. 1. Taddeo Zuccaro, The Last Supper. Santa Maria della Consolazione, Rome.