The Assumption of Mary

Author: Esmé van der Krieke

This is one of the few early Italian drawings in the museum’s collection that was not lost in the disastrous museum fire in 1864, although the damage it sustained is evident.^[1] Despite the charred areas at the bottom of the sheet and the water damage in the centre, the scene nonetheless remains clearly identifiable. It is a composition drawing for an Assumption of the Virgin, executed in loose ink lines, with strong hatching over black chalk outlines.

The old attribution of the sheet was most likely in the name of Francesco Vanni (1563/1565-1610), an artist who was linked to the only Italian drawing of an Assumption of the Virgin listed in an 1852 museum inventory. Later, Felton Gibbons attributed the work to the sixteenth-century Florentine artist Giovanni Battista Naldini because of likenesses between the shadowy faces of the figures and the hasty use of line in sheets by Naldini in Florence and Princeton.^[2] Catherine Monbeig Goguel acknowledges in our sheet properties of Naldini, but regards the Virgin’s round head and the dark outlines around the eyes of the putti as more characteristic of Jacopo Zucchi (1542-1596).^[3] In one of Zucchi’s drawings in Florence similar putti do indeed have the same characteristic black lines around their eyes.^[4] Nevertheless, according to Monbeig Goguel the Rotterdam drawing is of poorer quality than is customary for these two artists and consequently rules out an attribution to either of them. Since both worked in Florence in the second half of the sixteenth century, we place the artist for the time being in this vicinity and this period.