Standing Female Saint Holding a Prayer Book in Her Left Hand

Author: Albert Elen

This drawing was included in the Koenigs Collection as a work by Benedetto Montagna (c.1481-1558) on the basis of a brief article by Parker (1928) about a comparable drawing of the frontal view of a half-naked standing woman in Paris.^[1] In the Venetian Masters exhibition of 1953 it was regarded as a work by his father, Bartolomeo Montagna, an attribution that has since been confirmed by Puppi (1962) and Meijer (1985). The former dated it to the years 1511-15 on the basis of similarities to figures in altarpieces in Santa Maria in Vanzo in Padua and Santa Corona in Vicenza, which Puppi dates around 1520.^[2]

The drawing is similar in style to a superb one that was recently at auction in London of a monumental standing woman from the Harewood Collection, and of one with Christ as Salvator Mundi in Windsor, two of the most impressive sheets of the small surviving oeuvre of Bartolomeo Montagna.^[3] Leaving aside the blue paper and the comparable standing figure it is above all the similarities to the first drawing that are surprising: the detailed modelling of the garment done with pen and brush in ink, and combined with white gouache applied with the point of the brush. This creates a chiaroscuro that gives the figure a sculptural quality that recalls the style of Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) (see I 488, for example). This drawing technique with abundant white heightening is characteristic of Montagna, as is the use of vertical and diagonal parallel brushstrokes to set the figure off against the background. The meticulous detailing of sheets of this kind is more reminiscent of finished drawings made as autonomous works of art than as preparatory designs for paintings or frescoes. However, the execution of the Rotterdam drawing is not as perfect as that of the other two, which are regarded as late productions and would thus argue for an earlier dating in the last two decades of the fifteenth century.

Montagna was a younger contemporary of Giovanni (c.1430-1516) and Gentile Bellini (c. 1430/1434-1507) and their brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, from whom he underwent stylistic influences and in which Mantegna's prints played a role, such as the engraving The Risen Christ Between Longinus and Andrew of c.1472, DN 643/206). For a half century until his death he was the leading artist in Vicenza, but he also worked in other large cities of the Veneto, painting many altarpieces and frescoes. In his native city he was closely associated with members of the distinguished Gualdo family, who were among his local patrons.^[4]