Study for the head of St Simeon

Author: Rosie Razzall

The drawings on the recto and verso of this sheet both relate to Signorelli’s altarpiece of the Circumcision (fig.) painted for the Compagnia del Santissimo Nome di Gesù in Volterra, dated to about 1490-1491, and now in London.^[1] Although on his visit to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in 1962 he initially described the drawing as ‘weak, studio’, Pouncey has been credited with first identifying the connection between the drawing and the painting,^[2] which was not mentioned in the painting’s early cataloguing.^[3] In fact, the connection with the National Gallery painting had already been noted by Lütjens in 1935, but remained unpublished.^[4] The drawing was not fully catalogued until it was included in Van Cleave’s PhD thesis (1995)^[5] and has since been acknowledged as an important example of the methodical nature of Signorelli’s workshop process.

The drawing on the recto is a beautiful head study for the figure identified as St Simeon, positioned directly behind the Virgin and Christ Child in the painting. According to the Gospel of Luke (2:25-35), St Simeon was at Jesus’s Presentation in the Temple where he held the child and ‘praised God, saying … my eyes have seen your salvation’.^[6] In the painting, he holds his hands up in a gesture of awe and raises his eyes to heaven. Here in the drawing Signorelli focuses on the details of Simeon’s amazed face, thrown slightly backwards, with red chalk subtly applied to the cheeks and lips, and the details of the forehead and beard fading into the page at the upper and lower edges. Signorelli’s study can be compared with his preparatory drawing of the head of St John the Baptist in Stockholm.^[7] The survival of both sheets suggests that it was typical for Signorelli to prepare refined head studies in red and black chalks to perfect the expressions of the figures in his paintings.

The drawing on the verso of the sheet is a rare surviving example of a compositional study by Signorelli before he went on to refine its various elements through figure and head studies. As Van Cleave has pointed out, this drawing must have been made before the head study on the recto and is an early plan for the composition, as it differs in several aspects from the final painting and includes various pentimenti.^[8] The Virgin is holding the Christ Child on her lap, while the mohel (a man qualified to perform circumcisions) approaches in the lower right corner. St Simeon, centred under an apse, is shown with his hands in the air, and is orientated in the other direction to the final painting. The Virgin’s head is shown in two possible positions. As first suggested by Van Cleave and repeated by Henry,^[9] the drawing has probably been trimmed. Most obvious in this regard is the few missing centimetres along the right edge of the verso, which is seen in the cramped trimming to St Simeon’s left ear on the corresponding recto edge (the drawings are upside-down on the sheet in relation to each other, further confirming the sheet’s workshop function).

Both Van Cleave and Henry have noted the faint pricking on the recto of this sheet, with both suggesting that the holes are too fine to have been used for pouncing, as they barely penetrate to the other side of the sheet. Van Cleave assumed that the faintness of the pricking is due to the fact that this drawing was used as a secondary sheet, which received the pricked outlines from another study of the same subject. These outlines were then used to make a new, more refined study, or, by flipping the sheet over, to reverse the position of the head as it appears in the final painting.^[10] Although it is drawn to the same scale, there are still differences in the proportions of the facial features, so the drawing of St Simeon was not used as the final cartoon for the painting. Henry believed that the outlines of the finished head study were pricked through to another sheet in order to preserve this design, which might have been referred to during painting.^[11] However, both of these theories about the pricking are complicated by this author’s observation that it is not only the head study that has been pricked: the verso study also appears to have received attention with the pin. The light pricking does not follow every line of the drawing on either side, nor does it pierce through the sheet, and its precise function remains unclear.

The only other surviving drawing relating to this commission, which sold in New York in 2020^[12] and was with the dealer Jean Luc Baroni in 2022, is a study for the figure on the far right of the finished painting, drawn from a male workshop model and converted into a female figure in the final painting. As Van Cleave has noted, composition drawings must have been much more widespread in his practice, but were often discarded during the working process.^[13] In this example, the early compositional sketch has been saved by the presence on the other side of the refined head study, a type of drawing that was attractive to later collectors. Certainly the head study was what appealed to Franz Koenigs when he bought the drawing in 1927, as the sheet was mounted with that study privileged as the recto.