Standing Saint Holding a Book, St John the Evangelist (?)

Author: Rosie Razzall

This drawing of a standing saint holding a book probably depicts St John the Evangelist. Early in the twentieth century it was linked to a sequence of sculptures of saints by the Sienese sculptor Jacopo della Quercia for the niches of the Trenta Altar in the church of San Frediano in Lucca.^[1] The limbs of the figure are too long, while the head is too small. The artist has paid great attention to the folds of the mantle, and although executed in graphic rather than sculptural form, they are somewhat reminiscent of those of Saint Ursula and Saint Lawrence in the Trenta Altar, as well as to draperies in other sculptural works such as those of the young Saint Blaise for the Misericordia church in Pietrasanta (1401-03);^[2] the Madonna and Child for the church of Sant’ Agostino in Santa Fiora (1415-20);^[3] and the figures in The Annunciation for the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Siena (1425-30).^[4]

There are very few surviving drawings by sculptors from this period, making this a rare sheet but also ensuring that it is difficult to determine the sheet’s authorship. Luciano Bellosi believed the Rotterdam drawing to be ‘the most intensely Quercesque’ of the handful of sheets attributed to Della Quercia,^[5] which include a drawing on parchment in London^[6] depicting part of the elevation of the Fonte Gaia, and a drawing in pen and ink of the figure of Charity discovered in the Biblioteca Civica Carlo Negroni in Novara in 1977.^[7] Bellosi pointed to a close connection with the wooden Madonna once in the church of San Martino, Siena.^[8] However, Degenhart and Schmitt published the drawing as the work of a Sienese artist from the second quarter of the fifteenth century, similar to the work of Giovanni di Paolo (1403-1482).^[9] Licia Ragghianti Collobi believed that it belonged to Giorgio Vasari's famous book of drawings,^[10] while Krautheimer initially regarded the sheet as having been ‘born under Jacopo's direct influence’,^[11] only later to rule out this possibility but keeping a date for the sheet of around 1412.^[12] Most recently, Laura Cavazzini placed the drawing in Della Quercia’s circle, but suggested the name of Giovanni di Francesco da Imola (active c.1413-1425), who worked with Jacopo on the Trenta Altar.^[13] She compared the figure in the Rotterdam drawing with the wooden Saint Bartholomew from the church of the same name in Collodi, Pescia, dated around 1410-15.^[14] She placed the Rotterdam drawing close to the end of the first phase of work on the Trenta Altar, before Imola’s imprisonment on charges of theft, rape and sodomy in 1413.