Allegorical Scene with a Kneeling Doge

Author: Albert Elen

This remarkable drawing in monochrome oils on paper belongs to a substantial group of more than 100 similar drawings by Domenico Tintoretto, most of which — 90 sheets —  have been held in the British Museum since 1907, as part of a dismembered late seventeenth-century album, formed by the Marchese Del Carpio in Rome in 1682.^[1] The collector Franz Koenigs acquired a small separate group of six oil sketches from an unknown source around 1929-30, four of which are in Rotterdam and two in Amsterdam.^[2] This one has so far only been published by Tietze/Tietze-Conrat (1944), who considered it the first idea for a votive painting of doge Giovanni Bembo (in office 1615-18) in the passage to the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Ducal Palace in Venice.

Although there is no resemblance to the painting, other than the figure kneeling in mirror image, the subject may well be the same: a bearded doge, recognizable by his fur robe, about to be crowned. A standing figure in the background on the left holds out the corno dogale (ducal headgear) while distracted by the figure at far left, and both are united by an angel hovering above them. The large figure kneeling before the newly elected doge may well be a personification of the city of Venice. The group in the right half of the composition is separate from the one on the left: above a figure kneels in adoration before a figure seated on clouds, probably Christ. Below at far right is a standing man, holding a book against his left hip, resting his right foot on the neck of a bound prisoner lying prone, while being approached by a naked child presenting him with something. This may be an allusion to Bembo's decisive victory over the Uskok pirates from Senj in Croatia, who had posed a serious threat to Venetian commercial shipping for decades. So perhaps this oil sketch is indeed the prima idea for the painting, which was rethought and radically changed into a centralized composition, leaving out the right half of the sketch entirely. Surprisingly, there exist no other drawings related to this subject or composition.