After Part of Vasari's 'Feast of Saint Gregory'

Author: Surya Stemerding

In 1539 Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) painted three panels for the refectory of the San Michele monastery in Bosco in Bologna. Two of them are now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna.^[1] The third panel, The Feast of St Gregory, is partly copied in the Rotterdam drawing.^[2]

The drawing was acquired in 1906 as a preliminary study for the painting, and thus as being by Vasari himself.^[3] That, though, is out of the question. It is a copy by a less talented artist who only drew the bottom half of the composition, the central scene. It is also noteworthy that he did not copy Vasari’s painting closely but departed from it in the depiction of most of the heads and details like the flagons at lower right, only one of which was copied. There are also two anonymous copies after the painting, in Rennes and Paris, but they are of the complete composition.^[4]

The type of watermark suggests that the draughtsman of the Rotterdam copy might be sought in northern Italy. A candidate proposed by Albert Elen is the young Pellegrino Tibaldi (1527-1596), who came from the region north of Milan where the watermark is documented. It is known from Vasari’s own statement in the Vite, that in his youth, before he left for Rome in 1543, Pellegrino was drawing copies after Vasari’s paintings in the refectory of San Michele in Bosco.^[5] Elen compares the Rotterdam drawing to two sheets in Los Angeles and Amsterdam.^[6]