The Stoning of Saint Stephen

Author: Klazina Botke

This sheet of studies, cropped on all sides, relates to the Stoning of St Stephen, the young deacon who was condemned to death in Jerusalem after false accusations of blasphemy. The martyr is pictured kneeling seven times, in a slightly different position in each case.^[1] His attackers stand with stones in their hands, arms raised, ready to strike him dead. They, too, were shown in a variety of attitudes with a swift pen. In the centre background is Saul of Tarsus (the apostle Paul before his conversion), seated on a throne.^[2] The sheet is a primo pensiero, an initial idea for a composition where the artist tries out different poses and movements. The limbs of some figures are actually drawn more than once. The brown and grey washes, applied with a brush, lend the figures shadow and volume. The brown ink may have been added last, as it seems to run over the grey wash in some places.

Paul van den Akker (2003) attributed the sheet to Lodovico Cigoli, and this was later confirmed by Annamaria Petrioli Tofani in a brief note on the mount.^[3] Van den Akker suspected that the drawing is a preliminary study for the famous painting The Stoning of St Stephen of 1597, for which at least nine other studies have survived.^[4] These sheets show that Cigoli spent a long time searching for the right composition.^[5] Given the sketchy nature of the Rotterdam drawing, it could be his first thoughts about the subject. However, the martyrdom of St Stephen was a popular theme in the sixteenth century and depicted by many artists in a similar manner. The positions of the two stone-throwing figures lower left are strikingly similar to a preliminary study by Bernardino Poccetti (1548-1612), now in Paris.^[6]

Van den Akker also based his attribution on likenesses to other studies by Cigoli, but he neglected to say precisely which works he meant.^[7] The study in Florence for the painting The Dispute of St Catherine is one of the few sheets with similarities to the Rotterdam sheet in terms of the handling of the pen, particularly in the reinforcing of the outlines and the hand of the man in the centre set down with a couple of disconnected lines.^[8] Some doubt about the attribution to Cigoli therefore remains.