Study of Two Sleeping Apostles from 'The Agony in the Garden'

Author: Rosie Razzall

This drawing shows two apostles asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane: the bearded St Peter on the left, and either St James or St John alongside, as told in the Gospel of Mark (14:32-43). The sheet is recognized here for the first time as a copy after the figures in Perugino’s The Agony in the Garden.^[1] The painting does not survive, but is known through a version attributed to Bernardino Di Betto Detto Pinturicchio (c.1454-1513) in a private collection in Florence,^[2] and a variant in Indianapolis.^[3] A preparatory drawing by Perugino for St James and St John was previously in the collection of the Grand Dukes of Sachsen-Weimar.^[4] The artist later repurposed the figure of St Peter for one of the background figures in The Last Supper in the Cenacolo di Fuligno, Florence.

A version of the painting in London^[5] by Perugino’s pupil Giovanni di Pietro (‘Lo Spagna’, active 1504-28) has minor changes to the positions of the apostles, who are also recorded in a cartoon in Florence.^[6] The Rotterdam drawing was previously thought to be connected to the London painting and, as a result, was attributed to Giovanni di Pietro.^[7] However, the positions of the figures in the Rotterdam drawing, with the apostle on the right leaning on a rock, and St Peter’s feet both facing to the right, are close to Perugino’s original, so the copyist must have been referring to that version rather than one of the later variants. Another copy of the same figures is at Windsor.^[8] St Peter appears alone in a drawing in Besançon,^[9] and in one on the art market in 1977.^[10] All these copies were probably prepared by various members of Perugino’s workshop as a means of learning and recording his motifs. While the Windsor and Besançon drawings are made in pen and ink, the Rotterdam sheet is stiffly drawn in metalpoint, a medium often used by pupils when training the hand, on a brown prepared ground. St Peter’s legs have been incised against a sheet of blackened paper, as the outlines appear in black on the verso. Another example of a motif copied in metalpoint by a member of Perugino’s workshop is the musical angel in DN 107/4.

The drawing had an association with Perugino when it was with the collector William Esdaile (1758-1837) in the nineteenth century, but this connection had been lost by the time the study passed to Adriaan Domela Nieuwenhuis, who mistakenly saw a likeness to the drawings of the Venetian artist Jacopo de' Barbari (1460/1470-before 1516).^[11]