The Birth of the Virgin

Author: Rhoda Eitel-Porter

This small drawing vigorously maps out the complete composition for a scene of The Birth of the Virgin in broad pen strokes. It indicates large areas of shadow and light with generously spaced parallel hatching, but does not yet specify details such as facial expressions. The baby is being washed and swaddled by two women at the lower left and the new mother, upright in bed, is being brought fortifying delicacies, with music-making angels rejoicing at upper left.

As was first recognized by Luigi Grassi in 1956, and independently by Janos Scholz,^[1] the drawing is one of a series illustrating scenes from the Life of the Virgin. Four of the related drawings, depicting Joachim Cast Out of the Temple, The Annunciation to St Anne, The Meeting of St Anne and Joachim at the Golden Gate and The Presentation of Christ in the Temple are in Milan.^[2] A fifth, The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, formerly in the collection of Janos Scholz, is now in New York.^[3] A sixth drawing, showing an enthroned bishop and several other figures, including St Lawrence, which sold at auction in Paris in 2010 as attributed to Giulio Campi, was brought to Albert Elen’s attention as possibly by the same hand. Even judging only from a poor image without having seen the original, it nonetheless seems clear that it is by a different hand from the Rotterdam-Milan-New York group, lacking, for instance, the latter group’s bold outlining.^[4]

The Rotterdam drawing was acquired by Franz Koenigs in 1926 at auction in Paris as by Vittore Carpaccio (c.1465-1525/1526) and was published under this attribution by Von Hadeln in 1933. Although they accepted a Venetian origin for the drawing, Tietze/Tietze-Conrat rightly rejected the attribution to Carpaccio in their publication The Drawings of the Venetian Painters of 1944.^[5] Indeed, the drawing is unlikely to be by Vittore or even his son Benedetto (active 1520-1560), and a number of alternative attributions have been proposed. A watermark similar to the one in the Morgan Library drawing was used in the 1470s in Piedmont.

A comparison first made by Tietze/Tietze-Conrat with a drawing described as St Mark Preaching in the Piazza in Alexandria, from the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth House, has some merit.^[6] Although a more finished composition, similarities to the Life of the Virgin series include the widely spaced hatching, a slightly stiff, wooden aspect to the figures, which do not seem to fully occupy space in a three-dimensional manner, even when placed at a slight diagonal. The Chatsworth drawing is tentatively attributed to Giovanni Bellini’s pupil Lattanzio da Rimini, who was active in Venice from 1492 to 1524 because, as Von Hadeln in 1925 was the first to argue, the presumed subject of St Mark preaching is an unusual one and the drawing might be a study for Lattanzio’s painting of 1499, once part of a series illustrating the history of St Mark in the chapel of the silk weavers in S. Maria dei Crociferi in Venice.^[7] Lattanzio’s painting no longer exists, but the square format of the drawing corresponds to that of the two surviving paintings from the chapel, one now in Berlin, by Cima da Conegliano (c.1459/1460-c.1517/1518), the other in the Liechtenstein collection in Vaduz. Peter Humfrey, who notes that the drawings were probably for an unknown narrative cycle like Carpaccio's own for the Scuola degli Albanesi, writes ‘I suppose that one could argue that these drawings were executed by Lattanzio in the (unrealized) hope of landing the commission for the Albanesi cycle. Subject, format and date would all fit. But this would be very speculative’.^[8]

A number of alternative attributions and relationships have been proposed. The Chatsworth and Rotterdam drawings have been published as by the same hand as a pair of studies in London, namely St Christopher in Lycia, and the Arrest of St Christopher.^[9] These scenes from the Life of St Christopher are thought to have been drawn by an artist from the Paduan workshop of Francesco Squarcione (1397-1468) in around 1450. Despite some similarities between the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and British Museum sheets, we are probably looking at two different artists. The Squarcione workshop figures are more elongated than the compact Rotterdam-Milan-New York figures. Also, the scale of the figures is different, but this may partly be due to the nature of the scenes.

In 1979 Ugo Ruggeri put forward the name of Boccaccio Boccaccino (c.1465/1467-1524) for the group, an artist mostly active in Cremona, by whom very few secure drawings are known. The available comparative material does not support such an attribution. There also appears to be little basis for the attempts to identify the artist as Lazzaro Bastiani (recorded 1449-1512).^[10] On balance the penmanship of the Rotterdam drawing seems closer to Giovanni Bellini (1437-1516) than Carpaccio, although the drawings may well be by a provincial follower of one or the other rather than a member of a Venetian workshop.