Brother Leo Shielding his Eyes

Author: Rosie Razzall

In 1928, Franz Koenigs acquired a group of seven drawings believed to be by Signorelli or his school, followed by a further two drawings in 1929.^[1] Of this total of nine drawings, two are now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where they are claimed by the State of the Netherlands (I 270 and I 275).^[2]

All nine drawings bear the monogram LS written in pen and ink in one of the lower corners, except for I 287, where the corner has been trimmed diagonally and the letters cut off. In her 1995 PhD thesis and catalogue of Signorelli drawings and copies, Van Cleave listed 21 sheets in an ‘inferior group of copies after Signorelli’, all inscribed in pen and ink with these intertwined initials.^[3] Some of Signorelli’s autograph drawings also bear the initials (for example, in London^[4] and Paris^[5]), but their meaning remains unclear. The letters may have been added by a variety of hands at different dates, or were possibly added to a group of autograph and studio drawings by an early collector.^[6]

Van Cleave inadvertently included only one of the Rotterdam drawings in her cataloguing of this group (I 269), noting the location of others in Berlin^[7] and several private collections.^[8] Clearly all nine Rotterdam drawings belong to the same group, which she describes as after ‘late works by Signorelli and his school… They were obviously familiar with a broad range of Signorelli’s works and may have been resident in Cortona’.^[9] Although she suggests that ‘the copyists may have been working during the mid-sixteenth century, shortly after Signorelli’s death’,^[10] it remains equally possible that they were made by artists in his workshop while he was still alive, and under his direction.

The nine Rotterdam examples are in a range of hands, some juvenile, and are probably all copied after the painted or drawn models circulating in Signorelli’s circle or workshop. Some are drawn in chalks, while others are in pen and ink and wash, a medium that was rarely used by Signorelli himself. Some sheets suggest the presence of two different artists working on the recto and verso of the sheet. Others have been worked on by more than one hand, with a chalk drawing reinforced in pen and ink by another artist.

The present drawing was acquired together with I 287: the two drawings are related to each other and are probably by the same hand. This sheet depicts a seated monk, likely to be St Francis’s companion Brother Leo, shielding his eyes from a heavenly light, while the other drawing must be St Francis of Assisi, identifiable by his nimbus, holding his arms out to receive the stigmata. Although Luca Signorelli’s 1510-12 painting of the Stigmatization in Lucignano includes both monks, the positions of the figures are not very similar to the pair in these drawings.^[11] The present author believes instead that these drawings may be related to the figures in Bartolommeo della Gatta’s (1448-1502) St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, painted in 1486-87 for the altar of the Stigmata in the church of San Francesco, Castiglion Fiorentino.^[12] There are still differences between the painting and these drawings, with the lower part of both bodies differing from the final painting, and the figure of Brother Leo rotated further round in the painting. Della Gatta worked with Signorelli on various projects, and the copies may have been made many years later by an artist in Signorelli’s workshop familiar with Della Gatta’s example. As Reed has noted, Della Gatta’s depiction of Brother Leo as an active participant in paintings of the Stigmatization was transformational and much imitated in subsequent representations of the subject.^[13] There is offsetting in black and red chalk from another drawing once stored adjacent to the sheet.