The Preaching of John the Baptist

Author: Klazina Botke

Between 1508/1512 and 1526, Andrea del Sarto, working with Franciabigio (1482-1525), created twelve monochrome murals in the covered cloister of the Chiostro dello Scalzo. The frescoes depict scenes from the life of John the Baptist and are described at length in the second edition of Vasari’s Lives (1568), in which he explains how Del Sarto used several figures from the work of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) for The Baptist Preaching to the Crowds.^[1] The woman with a child on her lap and the dignified man on the right-hand side, dressed in a long robe, were both borrowed from prints by the admired German artist.^[2]

This red chalk drawing is a copy after the fresco. We see John standing on an elevation in a landscape, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers listening enthralled to his words: ‘Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’^[3] On the verso of the sheet there are less worked out versions of a number of these figures. Many copies of the frescoes in the Chiostro dello Scalzo were drawn during the sixteenth century, including The Preaching of John the Baptist by Giovanni Battista Naldini (1535-1591), now in Florence.^[4] Whereas most copyists tried to follow Andrea del Sarto’s original as faithfully as possible, the maker of the Rotterdam drawing deliberately departed from it. There are clear pentimenti, particularly in the pose of the principal figure, who looks in a different direction, with a variation of the right arm sweeping out to one side, while the kneeling figure in the left background has been omitted. John is shown in the same position on the verso, in combination with alternative poses for other figures in the fresco. Shearman (1965) posits that the differences between the drawing and the fresco, which are also seen in a second sheet by the same hand in Rotterdam (I 113), point to forgeries; the pentimenti would have been specifically designed to make the drawing look like a genuine preliminary study in Del Sarto’s own hand.^[5] It is possible, though, that the now anonymous artist was using the frescoes as an aid in trying out poses and perhaps using the composition as a basis for his own inventions.^[6]