The Personification of Hope

Author: Gert Jan van der Sman

This drawing is one of a series of personifications of the seven virtues that also includes the allegories Justice (I 107) and Fortitude (I 533). It is generally assumed that the three sheets were part of a sketchbook. The artist created variation in the colours of the preparation layers and prepared the versos of the drawings in different shades. This lack of uniformity would suggest that the drawings were primarily designed for use in an artist’s workshop.

Thematically, a drawing of the personification of Charity in Paris complements the three Rotterdam sheets, but it differs from them appreciably in technical terms.^[1] Charity was drawn with a metalpoint and is very finely executed. The three Rotterdam drawings were done in pen and ink, so the outlines are sharper and the hatching is heavier. Byam Shaw (1983) rightly inferred from this that the Rotterdam drawings came later. He believed that they were derived from an early set of the seven virtues and that, as of this moment, only the drawing in Paris is known.

Stylistically, the drawing in Paris can be placed in the circle of Giovanni dal Ponte (c.1385-c.1437), a painter whose elegant style has an affinity with that of Lorenzo Monaco (1370/1371-1423/1424). Giovanni dal Ponte’s oeuvre also has aspects in common in an iconographic sense. The umbrella-shaped aureoles that adorn the heads of Charity, Hope and Fortitude are also found on the panel The Seven Liberal Arts in Madrid and the pendant The Seven Virtues, which was sold at auction in New York in 2016.^[2] Giovanni dal Ponte is also thought to be responsible for the depiction of the three divine virtues on Cardinal Pietro Corsini’s painted tomb in Florence Cathedral of 1422.^[3] As in the drawing discussed here, the personification of Hope there is shown in profile, but in that case facing left.

The three Rotterdam drawings can only be dated approximately. The use of pen and ink on prepared paper was unusual before 1475. Degenhart and Schmitt (1968) were able to emphasize that Florentine artists and their assistants fell back on early fifteenth-century iconographic examples until well into the century.^[4] Supposing that the drawing in Paris was made around 1425, the Rotterdam sheets would be dated more than fifty years later.