John the Evangelist

Author: Surya Stemerding

The drawn oeuvre of Jacopo da Bologna, a minor artist from the Emilia, was not defined until 1988. Prior to that his drawings, this one included, were regarded as the work of Jacopo Ripanda (mid-fifteenth century-after 1517), his presumed teacher.^[1] Faietti and Ebert Schifferer (1988) were the first to distinguish three different hands in the drawings attributed to Ripanda: Jacopo Ripanda, the Master of the Lille Adoration and Jacopo da Bologna. They only allotted a small part of that collection to Da Bologna, a mere ten sheets. They did so on the basis of stylistic and thematic features in common with a remnant of a lost sketchbook, now in Lille, that contains the annotation ‘Jac pictor d[…] bollogna’ and the date 1516.^[2] They allocated another drawing in Rotterdam to that group (I 33), together with this one.

There is a composition drawing in London and two sheets with drawings on both sides in Berlin that are very comparable in both style and technique to the evangelists on the two sides of the Rotterdam sheet.^[3] They are all in a striking chiaroscuro technique with dark washes and white highlights on a dark ground. Each of the two Berlin sheets has conspicuous Roman numerals in brush and red paint. They are similar to the ones on the Rotterdam sheet, indicating that they share a common provenance, possibly the same workshop stock.^[4] The same red gouache was used on the back of the Rotterdam sheet, where St Luke is painting a scene of saints on panel after having just dipped his pen in the little bowl on his desk.