Study Sheet with Figures and Architecture

Author: Sarah Vowles

Universally accepted as a late drawing from the 1580s, this sheet shows Paolo Veronese exploring and refining a composition through a series of brisk vignettes clustered together on the same page. Unusually for studies of this type, the sketches all appear to relate to the same concept, rather than representing different subjects: in this case, a figure, presumably a saint, is taken away to be martyred, with a fortified city wall and clustered buildings in the background. Bystanders include soldiers, townspeople and, in the lower drawing, a swiftly-sketched greyhound, typical of Veronese’s habit of enlivening scenes with incidental detail. Unfortunately, the drawing cannot be connected with any known painting. Tietze/Tietze-Conrat suggested that it showed the martyrdom of a female saint, although the gender of the prisoner is not immediately clear, and Cocke compared the buildings to those in The Martyrdom of St Afra in the eponymous church in Brescia.^[1] The link, however, appears to be largely circumstantial.

The domineering medieval architecture of the drawing is one of its most striking qualities and has led to numerous thematic and stylistic comparisons to a drawing in Kassel of the same period.^[2] Here, too, a complex jumble of figures and buildings defies precise identification, although both the Kassel and Rotterdam drawings have been linked to Veronese’s historical scenes in Venice, particularly The Conquest of Smyrna.^[3] There are certainly architectural similarities, as the painting features a central cityscape with a prominent wall and a pointed arched gateway; but the subject of the present drawing appears to be entirely different. The foreground figures in the main vignette are certainly soldiers but the present author is unconvinced by the suggestion that some of them are Turks.^[4]

The verso of the sheet shows a fragmentary list of accounts, hidden by a backing sheet until 2002, which confirms the date usually assigned to the drawing. Entries on the lower two lines of the list include the dates 1580 and 1581, making it highly likely that the studies on the recto do not predate this.