Woman Seated on a Cushion, with a Hilly Landscape and a Small Church

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 nine 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 (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 suggest the presence of two different artists on the recto and verso of the sheet.

The present drawing was elevated by Van Cleave to workshop of Signorelli, and catalogued separately from the other copies after his works.^[11] The quality of the pen and wash draughtsmanship is certainly more accomplished, especially when compared with I 269 verso, with the outlines drawn finely with the pen and subtle gradations in the drapery completed with delicate cross-hatching. The upper half of the sheet, with a reclining woman seated on a decorated cushion, is probably by a different hand to the lower half of the sheet, which shows a simplistic landscape with a small rectangular chapel and trees with oversized birds in their branches. Van Cleave connects the reclining woman with the figure of St Catherine in a painting now in Florence,^[12] although given that the painting is in reverse to the drawing, this author finds a more plausible connection with the seated Virgin in a tondo of the Adoration of the Shepherds sold in London in 2021,^[13] and now attributed to Signorelli’s nephew, Francesco (deceased 1553). However, the connection is not close enough to suggest an attribution of that part of the sheet to Francesco Signorelli, and is probably based on a frequently reworked stock pose. Van Cleave has also suggested that the chapel bears some similarity to the chapel of San Crescentino at Morra, where Luca Signorelli painted.^[14] On the verso of the sheet is a very simplistic outline profile of a head, almost certainly drawn by a child, who may have joined the workshop at ten or eleven years old.