Two Studies of Stags

Author: Rosie Razzall

This study of two stags in pen and ink was initially accepted as an autograph drawing by Pisanello (1395-1455),^[1] but during the 1960s several scholars began to doubt the attribution, preferring to place it under Lombardy or northern Italy.^[2] A connection between several drawings of stags and Pisanello’s painting of St Eustace in London,^[3] first identified by Haverkamp Begemann,^[4] has also now been rejected,^[5] and loose similarities between the pose of the standing stag in the Rotterdam drawing and the London painting are likely to stem from the fact that Pisanello made many studies of animals, including dogs, birds, monkeys and deer, which provided ample source material for members of his workshop to copy. Indeed, the Rotterdam study has significant differences in the shape of the neck, the muzzle and the position of the animal’s head.

Several comparisons have also been made with the various studies of stags in the Codex Vallardi in Paris, among them a drawing of stags’ heads,^[6] which is much closer to the animals in the London painting.^[7] However, in 1996 two scholars plausibly grouped the Rotterdam drawing together with four specific sheets in Paris (three from the Codex), believing them all to be by the same hand:^[8] a study of a stag with a group of dogs below,^[9] a sheet with three studies of stags and two guinea fowl,^[10] and two other sheets that include a leopard^[11] and various dogs.^[12] The stylistic comparison between the Rotterdam sheet and the second of these four drawings is particularly compelling, with the stags in both sheets drawn with sturdy necks, spindly legs and bulging eyes. Blass-Simmen went further, exploring the connection between drawings originating from the Pisanello workshop and the illuminated illustrations in the Borso Bible, made for Borso d’Este in Modena in 1455^[13] and decorated with a variety of animals, plants and biblical scenes. Blass-Simmen proposed that the Rotterdam sheet, together with the two stag drawings in the Louvre and probably the other two sheets identified by Cordellier as well, should be attributed to Taddeo Crivelli (deceased 1479), a pupil of Pisanello’s and the Borso Bible’s principal illustrator. Crivelli had likely made copies after his master’s examples that he was able to refer to when working on the manuscript, which was begun in the year of Pisanello’s death. Although it is not an exact match, she notes the similarity between the recumbent stag in the Rotterdam drawing and the female deer in reverse on folio 176 recto in the first volume of the Borso Bible (fig.). Nonetheless, the stylistic similarities of the group tie them together in terms of attribution but do not preclude the possibility that the artists working on the Borso Bible were using another copy of similar models. If the Rotterdam drawing (and the rest of the group) is not in fact by Crivelli, which would date it to after 1455, it is best placed in Pisanello’s workshop and could therefore be given an earlier date of the 1430s.^[14]

Earlier scholars have noted traces of metalpoint under the pen-and-ink outlines, but these are very difficult to discern. The arrangement of two animals on the page, with blank space between them and no indication of the background, is also typical of the model books that circulated in artists’ workshops. Also notable is the series of parallel horizontal lines, drawn with a stylus, ending around two thirds of the way down the page and part way in from each edge. As Haverkamp Begemann first implied,^[15] these ruled guidelines for manuscript lettering might be consistent with the sheet (now cut in half, and with old stitching holes on the left) having originated from the workshop of a manuscript illuminator, a fact that might support Blass-Simmen’s thesis that the study is by Crivelli and relates to the Borso Bible. The appearance of two studies in different poses suggests that a discarded blank page has been repurposed rather than itself being intended to become a finished manuscript page. A small squiggle in pen and ink at the lower left edge also suggests the artist was content to use a spare part of the page to test their nib before use. There is a small pair of legs and hooves on the verso, comprising another partly executed study of a deer that has not yet been published.

The erroneous inscription at the bottom of the sheet, ‘de Cimabue’, is undoubtedly later, although Degenhart/Schmitt previously and mistakenly grouped it together with the seventeenth-century inscriptions on various sheets believed to have belonged to Pisanello's taccuino di viaggio (traveller’s notebook).^[16] As none of those inscriptions include a preposition before the artist’s name, and it is in French rather than Italian (‘de’ not ‘da’), the inscription was most likely added after the drawing went to France, where it still remained in the nineteenth century.