Altar Boy with a Candle

Author: Klazina Botke

In 1651 Doge Nicolò Sagredo (1606-1676) acquired a large proportion of drawings directly from the studio of the Bassano family.^[1] The distinguishing inscription ‘B.B. no. 3’ (Lugt 2103a) on the verso of this sheet means that it is almost certain that the Rotterdam drawing belonged to this collection. The two letters stand for Bottega Bassanese, the Bassano family workshop. From the 1560s onwards Jacopo Bassano was the head of this family business and responsible for the development of the original compositions, while his sons Francesco, Giambattista (1553-1613), Leandro (1557-1622) and Girolamo (1566-1621) continued to execute and copy his ideas until well into the seventeenth century.^[2] Because the members of the family worked together so closely it is difficult to distinguish the different hands from one another.^[3] This is true not only of the paintings but also of the many drawings that have survived, among them this sheet with an altar boy.

The boy, seen from behind, wears a red cassock under a white surplice. He holds a long, burning candle out in front of him. The composition is skilfully set down in black and coloured chalk, and the original paper colour was used to create folds in the surplice. The altar boy appears in the painting The Circumcision of Christ from the former collection of the Duke of Orleans. The canvas itself has not survived but the late-eighteenth-century print after the painting provides a clear picture of the composition.^[4] Jacopo Bassano is named as the painter in the accompanying text. In view of the relationship with this painting, Tietze/Tietze-Conrat (1944) also attributed the Rotterdam drawing to Jacopo. Arslan (1960) doubted this attribution and suggested Jacopo or Francesco as the possible maker, whereas Gibbons (1977) described the drawing as a work after Jacopo’.^[5]

There are presently at least five known painted copies of The Circumcision of Christ that are probably based on the ricordo in Princeton, attributed to Francesco Bassano.^[6] The architectural fragment in the background and the boy’s unfinished cassock suggest that our drawing is a copy after the canvas and not a preliminary study. The space lower left appears to have been left empty because a woman and child were pictured in this spot in the painting. There is also a surviving drawing of these figures, likewise from the Koenigs Collection and now in Moscow (I 55).^[7] Like the ricordo in Princeton, these sheets could have been used in the workshop while making copies of The Circumcision of Christ. Jacopo’s chalk drawings are generally looser and more energetic, and look more painterly, while the more descriptive and controlled studies, like this one, are virtually always attributed to his son, Francesco.^[8] The Rotterdam sheet is therefore very probably made by the latter.