Composition Study for 'The Triumph of Sebastiano Venier'

Author: Albert Elen

After receiving his first artistic training in the workshop of his father Giovanni Battista Maganza (c.1513-1586) and subsequently with Giovanni Antonio Fasolo (1530-1572), both in his native town Vicenza, Alessandro spent four years in Venice before returning home, settling as an independent artist in 1576.^[1] In Venice, he had familiarized himself with the work of the leading artists Tintoretto (1518-1594), Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) and Palma Giovane (c.1548-1628). Their influence is particularly evident in his drawings, most of which are rapid and spirited pen sketches over an underdrawing in black chalk. Their vivacious, skilful handling is particularly reminiscent of Veronese’s compositional drawings and they have therefore sometimes been confused with his.

A substantial group of drawings from Maganza’s estate stayed together and was at some time mounted into a collector’s album, afterwards owned by Sir Archibald Alison (1757-1867) of Glasgow.^[2] Half a century later, the album came into the possession of the Florentine art dealer Luigi Grassi (1858-1937), who was probably responsible for its dismemberment.^[3] Unfortunately, the original album and its contents have not been documented but most of the drawings found their way to two important Dutch collections, those of Frits Lugt (1884-1970), now in the Fondation Custodia, Paris,^[4] and Franz Koenigs, now in Rotterdam.^[5] The former bought 17 sheets from Grassi in 1929, labelled School of Tintoretto, the latter 13 sheets in the following year, as attributed to the Venetian period of El Greco (1541-1614).^[6] The attribution to Maganza we owe, more or less, to Tietze/Tietze-Conrat (1944), who stylistically compared two of the drawings from this group (S 22 and S 24) to a drawing in the Uffizi inscribed with the artist’s name, although they remained sceptical about an attribution, unable to relate them to paintings by Maganza, and considering most of the drawings to ‘correspond to painters of the middle of the seventeenth century’.^[7] Nevertheless, the attribution for at least one of the drawings was taken up by the American collector Janós Scholz (1903-1993), who wrote his attribution on the old mount, which was confirmed by Byam Shaw (1967, 1983) for several drawings.^[8] Byam Shaw (1983) considered all thirteen drawings in Rotterdam to be the work of Alessandro, and after careful study of each of them, we concur with his view (see the individual entries).^[9]

Our drawing is a compositional design for the painting The Triumph of Sebastiano Venier (fig.), a large vertical canvas installed on a side wall of the Cappella del Rosario in the church of Santa Corona in Vicenza (1513-1621) and still extant.^[10] It is one of two main paintings in an ambitious decoration programme that also includes 32 smaller paintings on the vault of the commemorative chapel. Venier (c.1496-1578), afterwards doge of Venice during the last two years of his long life, was the admiral of the Serenissima who defeated the Turkish fleet in the important naval battle of Lepanto (1571). In the drawing he kneels at lower right with two companions, looking up to Christ seated above in the clouds accompanied by two angels. At lower left some slain victims are sketched in black chalk, which was not drawn over with the pen like the rest of the composition. In the painting, Maganza diverged from his prima idea, maintaining the kneeling hero, but changing his clasped hands into an open gesture, ready to receive the laurels cast by the hovering angels above him, and rearranging his companions behind him, also adding four saints to the group around Christ. The lower left part was further worked out in the painting, adding some figures. Judging from the discoloured and smudged folds on the reverse this drawing was folded twice, probably to send it to the governors of the Confraternità del Rosario, who commissioned the decorations, as a vidimus for their approval, which they then must have given subject to some changes in the upper section, in view of the differences between design and painting.