Folio from the Gozzoli Album: Billygoat Lying Down (Seen from the Side) and Standing Horse (Viewed from the Front)

Author: Albert Elen

This is a folio from a hypothetical lost drawing book, a remnant of which is now part of an eighteenth-century album called the Gozzoli Album, held in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. For a general description, see here.

This page was originally folio 15 recto in the hypothetical lost volume.

Both figures belong to the late-medieval model book tradition and are copies after earlier prototypes. The horse in frontal view with the right front leg held up relates to the horse of St Francis in a fresco with the saint giving away his clothes to a poor soldier in the cycle in the apsidal chapel of the church of San Francesco in Montefalco (scene 2, north wall, 1450-52) (fig.).^[1] The goat derives – in reverse – from a prototype by Pisanello (1395-1455) in the Codex Vallardi, now in Paris.^[2] Similar representations of a goat, also in profile and in the same direction, but different in detail, are found in a drawing from a lost early fifteenth-century animal model book, now in New York,^[3] and in the Rothschild Model Book of c.1450, now in Paris.^[4]