Three Scenes with Many Figures in an Architectural Surrounding

Author: Rosie Razzall

The scenes on both sides of this parchment sheet are probably related to a fresco cycle, with several episodes from the narrative represented by a group of figures against an architectural backdrop. The scenes have previously been believed to be taken from the life of St Ursula, an assumption that is based on the attribution of the drawing to Tommaso da Modena (1325/1326-1379),^[1] who in 1358 completed a fresco cycle of the life of St Ursula in a chapel at the church of Santa Margherita degli Eremitani in Treviso.^[2] However, scholars have since raised doubts about the attribution of the drawing and the identification of the iconography, and there remain unanswered questions about the sheet.^[3]

According to the legend of the saint, Ursula was the daughter of King Dionotus of Dumnoia (present day Devon, Somerset and Dorset) who travelled to Armorica (present day Brittany) accompanied by 11,000 handmaidens to meet her future husband, Conan Meriodoc. The women were all murdered at Cologne during a pilgrimage before the wedding could take place. Although the scenes on the Rotterdam sheet can be loosely compared to Tommaso da Modena’s fresco cycle, the iconography does not definitively lead us to episodes from Ursula’s legend. On the recto, a scene at top left shows an angel seated on a throne with figures on either side. The following three scenes, at top right, bottom and at the top on the verso, all depict a group of figures appealing to a seated figure on a throne, and may be different alternatives for the same subject. The bowing figure with one leg in front of the other is repeated at a smaller scale in the blank space to the lower left of the recto, and there are two other cloaked, bending figures that may be related to the same scene. The final scene on the lower half of the verso shows a figure on a throne, surrounded by seated figures arranged in a semi-circle. Because of the repetition of figures, it seems more likely that this sheet is a preparatory working-out of ideas rather than a sequence of copies from a finished fresco cycle.

The drawing is closely related to a drawing on parchment in Vienna,^[4] which also has several scenes possibly showing Ursula and her father against an architectural backdrop, and a scene with another unrelated saint. The Rotterdam and Vienna sheets may have come from the same workshop pattern book. Both sheets have also been compared to a parchment sheet in Paris^[5] with studies for the Annunciation, and another sheet on paper also in Paris,^[6] depicting soldiers entering a castle via a drawbridge. However, the Rotterdam and Vienna drawings are not generally felt to be by the same hand as either of these two drawings. Degenhart/Schmitt recorded an inscription on the verso of the Rotterdam drawing, which they acknowledge was largely erased or illegible, and it cannot be seen on the drawing today.^[7] They believed that this inscription could be related to the ‘pseudo-signatures’ and numbering that appear on pages from the taccuino di viaggio, a parchment sketchbook that circulated in the workshop of Gentile da Fabriano (1370-1427) and Pisanello (1395-1455). The inscriptions are present on the Paris and Vienna sheets, and the Rotterdam-Vienna-Paris drawings all share the same Lagoy provenance. Other proposed attributions for the Rotterdam-Vienna sheets have included Giotto (c.1267-1337) or his circle,^[8] which would make the drawing even earlier than it is currently dated; Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c.1290-1348);^[9] and Altichieri da Zevio (1320/1330-1385).^[10] Most recently, scholars have preferred to give the sheet to an anonymous northern Italian artist.^[11]