Cain Slaying Abel

Author: Klazina Botke

‘And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him’ so the story goes.^[1] What the Bible does not say, however, is exactly how Abel was slain. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries artists often chose the moment when Cain had already overpowered his brother and was on the point of bludgeoning him to death with a branch, stone, club or even the jawbone of an ass. Instead of depicting Abel as a resigned martyr, we see him confused, wrestling on the ground. This is how he is shown in this drawing, where the naked Cain has raised his arm and is forcing Abel into the dirt with his left hand and his foot. The sheet has been trimmed at top and bottom, so we cannot see Cain’s weapon. The study was laid out in red and black chalk, after which the contours of the figures and several shaded passages were further defined in pen and black ink. The artist hastily jotted down the smoking sacrificial altar with the pen, and attempted to make the figure stand out against the background with greyish blue washes. It is an energetic scene drawn with rapid, forceful lines, but the anatomy is occasionally careless. There is tension, though, in the way Cain holds Abel down with his right foot, and how Abel resists by driving a foot up into Cain’s groin. Part of the scene is indented for transfer, and on the back of the sheet there are the outlines of a standing figure. This could have been done to copy the scene, or perhaps to reverse the composition.

In 1991, Paul van den Akker attributed this sheet, which was once given to Michelangelo (1475-1564) on the basis of an old inscription, to the Venetian artist Palma Giovane (1548/1550-1628).^[2] He based that partly on a comparison with Palma’s Cain and Abel in Vienna (1603).^[3] There is an early preliminary study for that painting in Amsterdam, but the Rotterdam sheet does not resemble it in either style or composition.^[4] Palma’s style is usually more rounded, scratchier and precise, as can be seen in the New York drawing.^[5] Van den Akker also associated the drawing with a study in Paris that Catherine Monbeig Goguel attributed to Francesco Morandini, and is wrongly identified as The Sacrifice of Isaac in the Louvre catalogue.^[6] That study is the primo pensieri (first idea) consisting of six hastily sketched compositions with Cain and Abel in different poses.^[7] The variant at top right is framed, and is worked up in the Rotterdam sheet. The relationship between the two drawings is undeniable, but the one in Rotterdam cannot be given to Morandini with any certainty, above all because his drawings are almost always more refined. The Christ in New York does approach our Cain a little, but that study is also softer and more precisely fleshed out.^[8]