Author: Albert Elen
This drawing is one of a group of four scenes with episodes from the life of St Nicholas of Myra (MB 954, MB 955, MB 956, MB 957). The sheets cohere both iconographically and stylistically and were acquired in 1847 with the collection of the museum founder Frans Boymans. They were attributed to the German artist Hans Weiner (c.1575-after 1617) at the time, and that is why the four sheets survived the museum fire in 1864, when most of the Italian drawings in the collection perished.[1] In 1967 the curator Hans Hoetink transferred them to Boscoli, an attribution that was confirmed in writing by Anna Forlani-Tempesti.[2] She did so on the basis of photographs and of similarities she detected between the four drawings and two sheets of drawings in Florence that are also framed in upright ovals: one with fifteen episodes from the life of St Nicholas and the other with fifteen miracles that he performed after his death.[3] In addition, she drew attention to the four corresponding scenes, numbers four, five, six and eight on the first sheet.[4] The scenes do indeed match. The Rotterdam drawings are characterized by a nervous and angular handling of line that simply indicates the contours, very forcefully here and there, notably by the mouths and eye sockets, while the Florence drawings are executed with the washes that are very typical of Boscoli. Forlani regards the Rotterdam drawings as detail studies for an unfortunately lost series of scenes from the life of St Nicholas painted on commission from a certain Niccolò Baruffi, for which the invoice of 12 April 1598 is recorded in Boscoli’s Libro dei conti.[5]
The four Rotterdam drawings may be fragments of a larger sheet, like the two in Florence.[6] Their paper has an identical pattern of laid lines (horizontal) and chain lines (vertical, three each time), without a watermark fragment. They were probably part of a larger series, given the annotated numbers 14, 18, 23 and 32. They would then have to come from two sheets, each with sixteen (4 by 4) oval cartouches, comparable to but slightly larger than the Florentine sheets, which also contain sixteen oval frames, one of which is always blank.[7]
The four drawings were inventoried as scenes of saints’ legends. It is clear from the correspondence to the Florentine sheet that they are from the life of St Nicholas, although the identification was initially problematic in two cases.[8] Nicholas of Myra (270-343) was an early Christian bishop who played an important part in the spread of Christianity. Boscoli undoubtedly used the Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend) by Jacobus de Voragine (1228-1298) as his literary source for the series. The drawing MB 956 (comparable to the fourth scene on the Florence sheet) depicts the vision granted to the chairman of the convention of bishops on the evening before a new episcopal election. Kneeling before an altar, with a vision of the Holy Ghost and Christ on the Cross, and with two mitred figures in the background, he receives the instruction that the first person called Nicholas to arrive at the door of the church the following morning must be consecrated bishop. Subsequently MB 957, comparable to the fifth scene on the Florentine sheet) we see the same bishop standing on a flight of steps and welcoming Nicholas as he enters the church. He is then consecrated bishop by the episcopal convention visible in the background. In the next scene (MB 955, corresponding to the sixth scene on the Florentine sheet) Nicholas asks the sailors kneeling in front of his bishop’s chair to give up part of their cargo of grain to alleviate the famine that is afflicting the town of Myra in Lycia (near present-day Antalya on the south coast of Turkey). In a following scene (MB 954 (corresponding to the eighth scene on the Florentine sheet), he watches how two men follow his instructions by chopping down a tree dedicated to the Greek goddess Diana (Greek Artemis), thus banning the veneration of idols.
