Head of a bearded man looking up to the left

This large and expressive drawing is a fragment of the cartoon for the now lost tapestry showing Christ in Limbo which is known through an engraving (in reverse) by Nicolas Beatrizet (fig. 1; see British Museum, inv. 1860,0211.146). The tapestry is part of a series of twelve tapestries known as the 'Scuola Nuova' tapestries (to distuinguish it from the famous 'Scuola Vecchia' tapestries) illustrating the twelve episodes from the life of Christ, of which the other eleven are in the Vatican Museums, Rome (inv. MV_43856-MV_43865). They were commissioned in 1520 by Pope Leo X, but due to his early death and the short tenure of his successor Pope Adrian VI, the weaving of them, by the studio of Pieter van Aelst, only started in 1524 and they were finished in 1531 (see A. Van Camp, op. cit., pp. 346-347). Inventories show that they were originally commissioned for the consistories (meeting of the college of cardinals) during Christmas and Easter, but An Van Camp has suggested that the entire series would have been too large to hang in either the Camera del Papa, the Sala Regia or the Aula Tertia and were therefore probably hung in rotation of six episodes (ibid., p. 346).

The authorship of the designs for the tapestries has been subject to much scholarly debate. The tapestries themselves are infused with Raphael’s style and it was probably Raphael’s artistic heir, Giulio Romano (circa 1492-1546) and later Giovanni Francesco Penni (circa 1496-circa 1528), who were responsible for their design (ibid., p. 347). No original designs for the tapestries have survived, but several compositional studies are known through copies after them (see ibid., figs. 1-3a-c). Of the original cartoons based on these designs some 40 fragments are currently known to have survived, of which eighteen (and three related to other tapestries), are in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. WA1846.234-WA1846.254).

The attribution of these cartoons has been subject to discussion too. The drawings at the Ashmolean Museum were until recently catalogued as Pieter de Kempeneer (1503-1587) and others from the group have been variously given to Giulio Romano and Giovanni Francesco Penni. In 1987, Nicole Dacos suggested they should be given to Tomasso Vincidor (see N. Dacos, ‘Raphaël et les Pays-Bas: L’École de Bruxelles,’ in Studi su Raffaello: Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Studi (Urbino-Firenze 6-14 aprile 1984), Urbino, 1987, I, pp. 611-623). More recently, however, Van Camp has suggested that the cartoons were not executed by Vincidor himself, but under his supervision by a number of artists. In 1520, Vincidor was sent to Brussels by Pope Leo X to supervise the papal tapestry projects and Van Camp has suggested that it was there that these cartoons were produced. Different hands can be distinguished, but none of the drawings have been firmly attributed to a specific artist so far (although Dacos has suggested a number of names, see N. Dacos, ‘Lambert Lombard et Lambert Suavius: Encore sur leurs débuts et leur voyage en Italie’, in Figura: Studies on the Classical Tradition, 1, 2013, online journal, https://figura.art.br/2013_9_dacos.html.//figura.art.br/2013_9_dacos.htm.

While the early provenance of the present drawing is not known, collector’s marks on other fragments of the cartoons reveal their shared provenance. The earliest known owner of them was the Dutch artist Govert Flinck (1615-1660) who cut them up. They passed on to his son, Nicolaes (1659-1723) who sold them to the London art dealer Peter Anthony Motteux (1663-1718). A large part of the group was acquired by the French engraver Nicolas Dorigny (1657-1746), whose collection sale included 104 fragments. During his life, however, he had sold a number of fragments to British collectors. More than 50 fragments were owned by Jonathan Richardson Senior (1667-1745) which were sold at his sales in 1747 and 1771 and others bear the mark of Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830). The present sheet does not appear to carry any collectors marks, but is likely that David Murray, 2nd Earl of Mansfield and 7th Viscount Stormont, bought it from one of these great collectors, either directly or from their sales.