Folio from the Gozzoli Album: Study after a Plaster Cast of a Foot, Child Feeding a Sheep

Author: Albert Elen

This is a folio from a hypothetical lost drawing book, a remnant of which is now part of an eighteenth-century album called the Gozzoli Album, held in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. For a general description, see here.

This page was originally folio 55 verso in the hypothetical lost volume (now a recto in the album).

The drawings of feet on the green-prepared album folios 5 verso, 6 recto and 8 recto were probably copied after existing model drawings of plaster casts rather than directly after the original casts. The page has been divided in three horizontal registers, very common in late-medieval model books.

The single drawing of a foot is almost identical to a loose drawing of a foot in the museum’s collection (MB 977v), which is also placed on a highlighted plinth, casting a shadow to the left. The latter drawing, however, is more convincing in the physical details and therefore probably closer to the original cast, and autograph. The foot is also bears some resemblance to a drawing by another hand in the Gozzoli workshop. On that sheet, now in Florence, the foot is depicted twice.^[1]

The model drawing of sheep is related to a detail in the landscape background of Gozzoli’s fresco The Vigil of the Shepherds on the left wall of the apse of the Cappella dei Magi in Palazzo Medici, Florence.^[2]