The Resurrection of Christ

Author: Klazina Botke

This lively but at the same time rather restless drawing is a composition study for a resurrection of Christ, with outstretched arms raised up out of the grave by six angels. Around the open tomb are the disciples, some still sleeping, some startled by what is happening. The figures are depicted with great plasticity, and lines and contours are repeated several times; the artist was clearly still seeking the right composition and poses. White heightening has been used to indicate accents but seems also to have been applied between the figures lower right to conceal pentimenti. The drawing is squared for transfer to another support and the squares are numbered down the left side and across the top. On the verso there is a small black chalk study of the upper body of a man with outstretched arms.

Julius Böhler sold the drawing as a work by Domenico Tintoretto (1560-1635), but according to Tietze and Tietze-Conrat the sheet should be attributed to Antonio Aliense (Antonio Vassilacchi, 1556-1629).^[1] Aliense’s style and ideas about composition are very much allied to those of Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594), in whose workshop he worked for a while. Tietze and Tietze-Conrat assume that our drawing is a preliminary study for The Resurrection of Christ (1586) in San Marziale in Venice, basing this on a description by Carlo Ridolfi (1594-1658), but according to Aikema and Meijer the composition differs too much from that work.^[2] Nor is the sheet a preliminary study for another resurrection that Aliense made for San Pietro in Perugia (1594).^[3] Although some similarities can be found, among them the dynamic nature of the scene, Christ’s pose and the sleeping figure lower left, the study differs too much from that work and the format is also inconsistent. In 1985 Meijer still attributed the drawing to Aliense, albeit with some reservations, but in a later publication he wholly abandoned this idea.^[4] Moreover, the clean handling of line that characterizes most of Aliense’s drawings, for instance the sheet in Princeton, is not found in our drawing.^[5] The study may be by an artist from the Veneto who was familiar with the work of Tintoretto and Aliense. The composition fits in well with similar images from the end of the sixteenth century, where Christ does not step out of the grave or hover statically above it, but rises up in a dynamic pose and is surrounded by angels.