The Martyrdom of Saint James the Greater

In a style rooted in that of his teacher Sebastiano Ricci and in a tradition going back to earlier Venetian painters such as the paintings of Paolo Veronese, Fontebasso produced a large body of independent drawings, as did his older contemporary Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (for a catalogue of Fontebasso’s drawings, see M. Magrini, ‘Francesco Fontebasso. I disegni’, Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, XVII, 1990, pp. 163-211). Both Fontebasso’s and Tiepolo’s are usually executed in varying degrees of finish, mainly in pen and wash, and treat religious subject as well as ancient history. Here, Fontebasso depicts the martyrdom of one of the apostles, ‘James the brother of John’, whom King Herod ‘killed with the sword’ (Acts 12:1-2). The drawing probably belonged to a larger series, as is more often the case with Fontebasso’s independent works on paper; they may originally have been bound in an album, as is still the case with the so-called Cini Album at the Museo Correr, Venice (Magrini, op. cit., passim, nos. 173-200, ill.). The desirability of these kinds of works and this format is demonstrated by the existence of some of these compositions in several versions, some autograph, others probably made in the artist’s workshop (compare S. Morét in Galleria portatile. Italienische Handzeichnungen alter Meister aus der Sammlung Hoesch, II, Petersberg, 2012, no. 45, ill.). However, no other version of the composition of the present sheet is known.