The Meeting of the Virgin Mary and Elizabeth

Author: Rosie Razzall

In 1928, Franz Koenigs acquired a group of seven drawings believed to be by Signorelli or his school, followed by a further two drawings in 1929.^[1] Of this total of nine drawings, two are now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where they are claimed by the State of the Netherlands (I 270 and I 275).^[2]

All drawings bear the monogram LS written in pen and ink in one of the lower corners, except for I 287, where the corner has been trimmed diagonally and the letters cut off. In her 1995 PhD thesis and catalogue of Signorelli drawings and copies, Van Cleave listed 21 sheets in an ‘inferior group of copies after Signorelli’, all inscribed in pen and ink with these intertwined initials.^[3] Some of Signorelli’s autograph drawings also bear the initials (for example, in London^[4] and Paris^[5]), but their meaning remains unclear. The letters may have been added by a variety of hands at different dates, or were possibly added to a group of autograph and studio drawings by an early collector.^[6]

Van Cleave inadvertently included only one of the Rotterdam drawings in her cataloguing of this group (the present drawing, I 269), noting the location of others in Berlin^[7] and several private collections.^[8] Clearly all nine Rotterdam drawings belong to the same group, which she describes as after ‘late works by Signorelli and his school… They were obviously familiar with a broad range of Signorelli’s works and may have been resident in Cortona’.^[9] Although she suggests that ‘the copyists may have been working during the mid-sixteenth century, shortly after Signorelli’s death’,^[10] it remains equally possible that they were made by artists in his workshop while he was still alive, and under his direction.

The nine Rotterdam examples are in a range of hands, some juvenile, and are probably all copied after the painted or drawn models circulating in Signorelli’s circle or workshop. Some are drawn in chalks, while others are in pen and ink and wash, a medium that was rarely used by Signorelli himself. Some sheets have been worked on by more than one hand, with chalk drawings reinforced in pen and ink by another artist. Others, such as this example, suggest the presence of two different artists on the recto and verso of the sheet.

On the recto is a sketchy, hastily drawn pair of figures in black chalk, possibly representing the meeting of the Virgin and St Elizabeth. The drawing is a preparatory study rather than a copy, with the artist considering various positions for the kneeling Virgin’s leg. Although Signorelli painted this subject at least once, his painting in Berlin does not correspond closely to the figures in the drawing,^[11] and Van Cleave has rejected an attribution to Signorelli himself.^[12] The drawing has been trimmed, presumably so that the sheet frames the more worked-up, though arguably less accomplished, pen-and-ink and wash drawing on the verso.

The verso drawing is in a more stilted hand, and shows a standing, robed woman with her head tilted to the right, probably intended to be a saint. The pose recalls elements of Signorelli’s drawings of Mary Magdalene in Paris,^[13] or St Lucy (last on the market in New York in 1990),^[14] but without the identifying pot of ointment or chalice. This figure is drawn in the much stiffer manner of a copyist, and reflects the way Signorelli’s models were endlessly repeated, copied and adapted in the workshop, with attributes swapped in and out according to the saint required. The elongated fingers, limbs and feet are of discordant proportions. In style and treatment, the drawing is similar to two pen-and-wash drawings last seen on the market in London in 1977, and the three drawings may be by the same hand.^[15]