Preliminary study for 'The Parable of the Wedding Feast'

Author: Surya Stemerding

This large drawing in poor condition is the modello for the fresco The Parable of the Wedding Feast (fig.) that Bartolommeo Cesi painted in the monastery of San Giovanni in Monte in Bologna.

According to the reconstruction by Zacchi (1997), Cesi made the fresco in the first decade of the seventeenth century.^[1] In the twentieth century it was removed from the wall (staccato) for a long-term restoration treatment and remained stored in six separate pieces in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna for four decades. In 1996 the fresco was put back in its original position in the monastery’s former refectory.

The drawing illustrates a parable described in the Gospel of St Matthew (22:1-14).^[2] It compares heaven to a royal wedding feast. A king, preparing a wedding feast for his son, sent his servants out to all corners of the world to invite the guests, but they refused to come and mistreated and murdered the servants. The king sent his troops to kill all the murderers and burn their cities. In their place he invited anyone and everyone his servants came across in the street, provided they dressed and behaved with dignity during the wedding. They all streamed into the banqueting hall. Then, amidst the festivities, the king saw a guest who was not appropriately dressed, despite the warning, and had him removed. The parable ends with the words: ‘for many are invited, but few are chosen'. The moral of the story is that only a few of the chosen ones actually reach the Kingdom of Heaven because they make the wrong choices during their lives.

The sheet in Rotterdam was squared so as to transfer the composition to a cartoon. That cartoon was used for a one-to-one transfer onto the wall, after which the fresco was painted. The differences between the modello and the fresco are minimal. The architectural space is identical down to the smallest detail; even the groins of the cross vault of the refectory were transferred.

Two other preliminary studies for the fresco are known; they are now in Berlin and Würzburg.^[3] The smaller drawing in Berlin shows an earlier stage in the design process. Although many elements of the eventual design can already be seen, the banquet scene in the background has been separated from the foreground by a huge loggia with a view through to an outside space. The foreground is executed in dark washes, while the scenes in the background are lightly sketched.^[4] The drawing in Würzburg is an intermediate stage, probably directly preceding the modello in Rotterdam, which is the same size. The Würzburg sheet was executed in pen and brush and brown ink, over an underdrawing in red chalk, without washes. The architectural space there is the same as that in the Rotterdam modello, as is the dining table with wedding guests in the middle ground. The figures in the foreground, who make their way past the king on his throne in a procession moving from right to left, are only partly worked out. Only the group of figures on the extreme right corresponds with the one in the modello. A number of individual studies for the figures in the middle and left foreground must have been made between the two design drawings.

Here and there, Cesi borrowed figures in the final composition from earlier works of his own.^[5] The artist often reused existing figures with which he was particularly pleased for new compositions.