Design for a Temporary Arch, with Samson and the Philistine and Hercules and the Nemean Lion

Author: Rosie Razzall

This drawing was convincingly attributed to Sebastiano Vini by Catherine Monbeig Goguel in 2015, when the drawing was published for the first time.^[1] Executed in black chalk enhanced with wash, the drawing shows a design for an archway flanked by Samson and the Philistine on the left and Hercules defeating the Nemean Lion on the right. These figures are based on designs by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), in one case a copy of a red chalk drawing of Hercules and the Nemean Lion at Windsor,^[2] and in the other case, a renowned sculpture of Samson and the Philistine known through many copies, but with the positions of the figures altered so as to fit into the curved archway. Above the doorframe is a mascaron flanked by fruit garlands and drapery. The exact purpose of the drawing is unknown, but as the two heroes are usually associated with Florentine civic iconography it is possibly a design for a temporary triumphal arch intended to be displayed in the city. Vini prepared other designs for temporary pageantry, such as a design for the funerary decorations of Francesco I (1541-1587) in Florence.^[3] Stylistically, Monbeig Goguel compares the draughtsmanship to an album of sixty drawings attributed to Vini in Paris.^[4]

At the centre of the sheet, pasted into a space underneath the archway, is a small study in pen and ink of a woman with a child at her breast, probably by another hand and unrelated to the triumphal arch. The Domela Nieuwenhuis inventory describes this as ‘Jacopo Francia’s hand’,^[5] possibly thinking of the Virgin and swaddled Jesus in a print^[6] by Jacopo Francia (1486-1557) of the Holy Family with St Elizabeth and John the Baptist, but the correlation is not very close. This drawing may have been placed into the convenient gap by a later collector.