Seven Studies for a Crucifixion and Putti

Author: Albert Elen

Listed in the D’Adda inventory of 1926^[1] as a work by Titian (c.1488-1576), with a reference to the artist’s altarpiece in Ancona, and in the Koenigs inventory as circle of Titian, Tietze/Tietze-Conrat (1944) accepted it as a typical drawing by Jacopo Palma, dating from the late sixteenth century.

Born as Jacopo Negretti, the artist was called Palma Giovane to distinguish him from his great-uncle, the artist Jacopo Palma, also known as Jacopo Negretti and – much later – as Palma Vecchio (c.1480-1528). He received his basic artistic training from his father Antonio Negretti (1515-c.1575/85), a minor painter. Subsequently, he went to Pesaro for three years to work at the Della Rovere court and then, encouraged by the Duke of Urbino, lived in Rome for six years to study the monuments and contemporary art as well as to develop his drawing skills. He returned to Venice in 1573. After a short while in the workshop of Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594), not as a formal pupil but joining in some of the life drawing sessions organized by Jacopo in the 1570s for his own children, young Palma established himself as an independent artist. Soon he received major state commissions for large ceiling paintings in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Palazzo Ducale (c.1579), where he worked almost shoulder to shoulder with Tintoretto, his former teacher. In the late 1580s Palma gradually changed his preferred drawing medium from Tintoretto’s favourite black chalk to pen and brown ink, occasionally combined with washes applied with the brush.

This sheet is typical of Palma’s prolific draughtsmanship and his pragmatic working method, sometimes combining several little sketches on one sheet, which resembles the style of Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) in its horror vacui. Here Palma penned five small sketches of Christ on the cross in frontal view, combined with three flying putti, and a tiny figure of a saint or donor at lower right, in preparation for one or more of his paintings of the Crucifixion.^[2] Van Regteren Altena rightly pointed to a similar drawing, now in Vienna.^[3] This is a large modello or worked-out composition drawing for Palma’s painting Crucifixion with Four Saints in the Chiesa degli Zoccolanti in Picena, which was executed with major modifications in 1590.

However, the sketches in the Rotterdam drawing are more closely related, as a prima idea, to a very similar Crucifixion with Three Saints, an altarpiece which Palma painted around ten years earlier in 1589-90 for the Collegiata di Sant’Elpidio a Mare near Fermo, twenty kilometres south of Potenza Picena.^[4] In that painting the figure of Christ and the angel on the right are much closer to our drawing, especially the sketches of Christ on the cross in the centre of the sheet and the putto right next to it. Moreover, the figure of the kneeling saint at lower right, which is related to a preliminary drawing of the individual figure, now also in Rotterdam (I 84 verso), corresponds in pose and the summarily indicated position of both hands with the roughly sketched figure at the foot of the cross in our drawing.

Surprisingly, this drawing has remained unpublished since Tietze/Tietze-Conrat included it in their corpus (1944), except for a PhD thesis on drawing skills and methods by Van den Akker (1991). Repeating the earlier attribution to the circle of Titian the latter mentions it as one of several examples of the use of the so-called ‘broken drawing style’ (contours indicated by short curving strokes of the chalk or the pen) in the representation of nude children. This is anatomically imprecise but has a mollifying three-dimensional effect, especially adapted for naked figures such as putti.