Study for St Lawrence

Author: Sarah Vowles

After making his initial sketches for a composition in pen and ink, Veronese frequently turned to black and white chalk on blue paper to create drapery studies for the main figures (for an example, see I 49). By the 1580s he had largely delegated this phase of preparation to his senior assistants, but at the time this drawing was made he was still producing figure studies himself. This light but evocative study is preparatory for St Lawrence in the Pala Malipiero, an altarpiece showing the saint flanked by Sts Jerome and Prosper in San Giacomo dell’Orio, Venice (fig.).

Veronese sketched out the saint’s inclined head, but left its features blank, as he would have prepared a separate study devoted to it. His focus here was on the costume, which he rendered with quick but expressive strokes of soft black chalk, building up a sense of the figure’s solidity. He emphasized the undulations on the sleeves of the saint’s dalmatic (the ecclesiastical garment which St Lawrence, as a deacon, is traditionally shown wearing in Western art), and hinted at the tighter-fitting longer sleeves of his undergarment. It is clear that he had already undertaken detailed compositional drawings, because he included the lower part of the dalmatic, for proper understanding of the figure, but left it almost entirely blank, knowing that it would be obscured in the painting by a book and a kneeling altar-boy.^[1] Darting strokes of white chalk trace the fall of light across the upper part of the sleeves and torso, and even highlight the saint’s fingers.

The related altarpiece was commissioned for the Malipiero Chapel in the Venetian church of San Giacomo dell’Orio, and can probably be dated to around 1573, when a campaign of redecoration took place.^[2] Given Veronese’s heavy burden of work in 1573 itself, and the fact that the final painting seems to be largely by his own hand and not by those of studio assistants, Rearick suggests that its execution might in fact date to 1574 or 1575.^[3] The saint’s pose changes only slightly in the finished picture, where he is turned a little further towards the front, and his arms are lowered by a fraction, probably to accommodate the iron grid, the instrument of St Lawrence’s martyrdom, which Veronese added alongside him.^[4]