St Ambrose on Horseback Driving Away the Arian Heretics

Author: Rosie Razzall

This drawing is one of a number of sheets in several collections that relate to Figino’s painting St Ambrose on Horseback Driving Away the Arian Heretics, commissioned by Carlo Brivio on behalf of the Tribunale dei Dodici di Provvisione di Milano on 25 January 1590. The altarpiece was intended to hang in a (now-destroyed) chapel in Palazzo dei Giureconsulti.^[1] It was completed in 1591 and remains in Milan (fig.).^[2]

The painting celebrates the defence of Nicene doctrine by St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan from AD 374 to 397, from the followers of Arianism, a heretical theological movement originating with the priest Arius (AD 256-336). St Ambrose refused to cede to the demands of Arianism and other pagan sects, including over the use of one of Milan’s churches, and is thus revered as one of the four Doctors of the Catholic Church and Milan’s patron saint. The painting shows the saint on a rearing horse, wearing his bishop’s mitre and holding a flaming torch as Arian followers are trampled under the horse’s hooves.

There are fourteen drawings for the painting in Venice,^[3] with a further two in Lisbon^[4] and one in Windsor.^[5] These drawings are clearly preparatory, and show Figino considering numerous compositional possibilities, including the horse seen in full profile, in mirror image, and with various positions of the head. The Rotterdam drawing is very close to the appearance of the final painting, and both Torrini and Pavesi took it to be a preparatory study from the final planning stages.^[6] However, the drawing might instead be a ricordo of the painting’s completed composition. The white highlights on the bishop’s mitre and cloak, the horse’s flank, and its rearing hooves follow the final appearance of the light in the finished painting very closely, and the horse’s left hoof is truncated at the edge of the sheet exactly as in the painting. The stilted lines of the figures being trampled also suggest that they are copied from a completed work. Whatever the precise relationship between this sheet and the finished painting, the use of white body colour on a dark brown prepared ground was the ideal medium for either planning or recording the dramatic lighting of the final composition. Though he drew most frequently in chalk or pen and ink, Figino occasionally made use of white heightening on prepared paper, and stylistically the sheet can be compared to a drawing of St Michael Expelling the Rebel Angels at Windsor,^[7] and other similar examples.^[8]

The drawing entered the collection in 1923 with another drawing^[9] by Figino from the collection of Adriaan Domela Nieuwenhuis. Both sheets had passed through the hands of the art dealer Giuseppe Vallardi (1784-1863) in the nineteenth century but were not attributed to Figino in the Domela Nieuwenhuis inventory.^[10] During visits to the museum the drawing was recognised by A.E. Popham and Philip Pouncey as by Figino, but it was not published until 1987 by Torrini.^[11] The two Rotterdam drawings and a drawing in New York^[12] all have a Vallardi provenance, and are presumably the pen and bistre drawings described by Cesare Cantù as part of Vallardi’s collection in 1844, having been seen in Milan by the art historian Luigi Lanzi (1732-1810) in the eighteenth century.^[13] After his death in 1608, the contents of Figino’s studio, presumably containing most of his drawings, passed to his nephew Ercole Bianchi (born 1576).^[14] Many of these drawings were later dispersed:^[15] a large group went to Venice where it was acquired by Consul Joseph Smith (c.1682-1770) and is now at Windsor, another group was acquired by the painter Giuseppe Bossi (1777-1815) and is now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, and another album was collected by padre Sebastiano Resta (1635-1714), the remains of which are now in New York.^[16] The inscription ‘Figino’ at the lower edge of the present sheet is seen on many of Figino’s drawings in Windsor,^[17] Venice^[18] and elsewhere, and may have been added by a number of different hands.^[19] However, the presence of similar inscriptions on drawings that were subsequently scattered to various collections suggests that they were added at an early date, possibly when in the hands of Ercole Bianchi.