Seated Male Saint

Author: Rhoda Eitel-Porter

Judging by the raised pen and open book, the seated figure is presumably one of the four evangelists – the facial type with the short beard is especially common for St Mark. Unusually, the figure has been drawn mostly with a fine brush on a linen support, probably to ensure its durability. Touches of pink, particularly on the cheeks, lips, nose and the right side of the face as well as the fingers and thumbs, highlight the flesh. The artist worked primarily with the chiaroscuro effects created by the white heightening, the mid-tone of the linen, and the dark brown wash, combined with a very sparing use of parallel hatching.

At the time of acquisition, the drawing was thought to be by an anonymous Paduan artist of the fifteenth century. The furrowed, expressive forehead, the crisply defined drapery and the hieratic pose contribute to its distinctive appearance and Venetian or North Italian artists such as Cosmè Tura (c.1430-1495) from Ferrara and Bartolomeo (c.1432-c.1499) or Alvise Vivarini (1442/1456-c.1503) from Venice have been proposed.^[1]

Gianmarco Russo recently put forward the convincing attribution to the Venetian Lazzaro Bastiani (1425/1430-c.1512), relating it loosely to Bastiani’s mosaic renovations in San Marco in Venice, carried out by Lazzaro and his sons Vincenzo and Alvise in the 1480s.^[2] The artist is first documented in Venice 1456 as the head of a family workshop. In the 1480s he worked with Gentile Bellini (1430/1434-1507) for the Scuola Grande di San Marco. Russo’s attribution is based on grounds of style, supported by telling comparisons, for instance, with the drapery of Bastiani’s standing figure of Christ Blessing in Modena,^[3] usually dated around 1485; the physiognomy of St Jerome in Penitence, in Springfield, Mass.,^[4] of c.1480; and St Damian’s hand holding an instrument in the polyptych from the workshop of Lazzaro Bastiani in Venice, of c.1485.^[5] Bastiani restored but also created entirely new figures in mosaic in San Marco, such as the standing figure of St Sergius, from after 1488, which he signed. He apparently used the same model for a sculptural detail painted in The Offering of the Relic of the True Cross, c.1494, now in Venice.^[6] The mosaic of St Thecla, of 1512, in San Marco by Vincenzo Bastiani is presumably also based on a model drawn by the father. Russo makes the case for the repeated reuse of designs and cartoons in the Bastiani workshop, especially for the San Marco commission, which helps to explain the archaic appearance of the mosaics and the antiquated style of this drawing.

Tietze/Tietze Conrat, in their volume on the drawings of the Venetian painters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had rightly referred to Bastiani as ‘one of the dark horses of Venetian Quattrocento painting’, noting that all attributions of drawings rest on uncertain foundations ‘in default of any authentic document of his style’.^[7] It is therefore particularly exciting to have here perhaps a touchstone for further attributions to this artist.