Bearded Man Wearing a Turban Looking Up

Author: Klazina Botke

Many of Jacopo Bassano’s drawings were done using a combination of different colours of chalk on blue paper. For this head of a man with a beard and a turban he used shades of red, white, orange and pink to lend the face vitality and warmth. To create a softer and more even effect he rubbed the chalk into the blue paper in some places, possibly with his fingertips, while he drew the beard with a number of strongly emphasized strokes chiefly in black chalk and just a few wisps in red chalk. The result was this animated head full of character. Jacopo began experimenting in coloured chalk in the late 1550s and we see this method recur in several of his studies of heads, including the ones in New York and Vienna.^[1] The use of coloured chalk did not really catch on in the Veneto, so drawings like this were soon associated with Bassano and his workshop.^[2]

The inscription ‘B.B. 45’ appears on the back of the sheet. This is the classification system of the Venetian collector Zaccharia Sagredo (1635-1729); the initials B.B. stand for Bottega Bassanese, the Bassano workshop. After spending some years in Venice, on the death of his father Francesco in 1539, Jacopo settled in his birthplace Bassano del Grappa and took over as head of his father’s painters’ workshop. Here he trained his own sons Francesco, Leandro, Gerolamo and Giovanni Battista. In 1944 Tietze/Tietze-Conrat specifically attributed our drawing to Jacopo after they had compared it with a corresponding study of a head in Vienna that was used in the painting The Descent of the Holy Spirit of around 1559, now in the Museo Civico in Bassano.^[3] This attribution is now generally accepted, since in terms of style and technique the study seamlessly echoes other studies of heads done in coloured chalk by the master himself.^[4]

Rearick (1987) was the first to observe that this study is based on the figure of King David in the woodcut The Triumph of Christ  (c.1508-16), which is composed of ten blocks and is more than two and a half metres long.^[5] This famous print after a design by Titian (c.1487-1576) depicts a procession of biblical and ecclesiastical figures with Christ in the centre on a chariot. Almost at the front of the procession King David walks among other patriarchs and prophets, playing on his lyre. We know that Bassano owned a great many prints from which he often drew inspiration for individual figures, compositions and even small details.^[6] He probably also had an impression of The Triumph woodcut, for we can see that he accurately followed the lines and hatching for the turban from the print.^[7] We know that he used the same head previously in a fresco (c.1536) in the choir of Santa Lucia at Tezze sul Brenta. Given that the style of the drawings clearly links up with Jacopo’s later chalk studies, including the study of a head in Vienna (1550-60), this can be dated around the same time.^[8]