Group of Seated and Standing Men, after a Lost Fresco in San Marco, Rome

Author: Klazina Botke

This battered sheet, the bottom right corner of which is missing, shows a group of standing and seated men. The head of the second man from the right appears also on the verso but on a larger scale. For a long time the work was attributed to the circle of Bernardino Pinturicchio (Bernardino di Betto Betti, c.1454-1513), as were two other drawings with the same composition in Princeton (fig.) and Cambridge (MA); the sheet in Princeton depicts the entire composition, the sheet in Cambridge only the right-hand side and our drawing the left-hand side.^[1] However, the three drawings appear to have been made by three different hands.

The scene is of an interior with a bearded man on a throne in the centre. He wears a scholar’s hat and holds a book in his hand. There are other men on his left and right, with or without books, wearing turbans or philosophers’ hats, who appear to listen, argue and discuss.^[2] It remains unclear, however, exactly what gathering is depicted. According to Sylvia Ferino Pagden, the spatial composition of two groups, one on each side, and the marked diversity of figures and costumes has a long visual tradition.^[3] We see this compositional construction in, for example, Pinturicchio’s frescoes in the Piccolomini Library in Siena, in the fresco by Il Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 1477-1549) with Benedictus Leaves the School (c.1505) in the Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore near Asciano, and in Alessandro Araldi’s (c.1460-1530) Saint Catherine in Discussion with Scribes (1514) in the church of San Paolo in Parma.^[4] The last work, in particular, is very similar to the composition of which our sheet is a copy.

In 1989 Ferino Pagden proved convincingly that the drawings in Princeton and Cambridge are copies of a lost painting by Pietro Perugino (Pietro di Cristofano Vannucci, c.1448-1523) for the basilica of San Marco in Rome.^[5] She discovered that in a fifteenth-century model book, by an anonymous artist, the locations of the drawn motifs are given.^[6] The text 'a sancto marcho' (in San Marco) adjoins the four men’s heads on fol. 5r; these exact same heads occur in the compositions in Princeton and Cambridge. The Rotterdam drawing therefore corresponds with this. Besides our sheet, there are also a number of other known studies that were copied after Perugino’s original, including a drawing of three heads in Paris and a study of a man’s head in Dresden.^[7]