Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist and St George

Author: Rhoda Eitel-Porter

The recto of this drawing shows the Virgin and Child accompanied by two kneeling male figures, at left John the Baptist, identified by his cross and banderole inscribed ‘Ec[c]e Agnus Dei’ (Behold the Lamb of God), and at right, a young man holding a banner with a cross on it. Tietze/Tietze Conrat in 1944 refer to the latter as St George, although in 1977 Muraro noted that he could represent St Liberale or Liberalis, patron saint of Treviso and Castelfranco Veneto, who is often shown with a banner decorated with Treviso’s coat of arms, a cross. The saint is in direct communication with the Child while the Virgin engages more closely with St John the Baptist. Both saints may have been based on workshop assistants posed in the studio, John the Baptist is shown semi-nude, whereas the saint on the right is in contemporary dress. Light falls in from the upper left.  

As first noted by Lauts, the composition recurs similarly in a drawing in Chicago,^[1] where the right-hand saint has been replaced by an older, bearded figure with a pilgrim’s stick, possibly St Roch.^[2] A later derivation, which combines elements from the Rotterdam and Chicago drawings but has the appearance of a workshop ricordo, is in Florence.^[3] It demonstrates that the design of the Rotterdam drawing was developed further, presumably into a finished painting. Although the youthful garzone (workshop assistant) in the Rotterdam sheet was replaced by the older pilgrim from the Chicago study, the figures of St John the Baptist and the Virgin and Child were transposed almost unchanged to the final version.

The half-length study of the standing male on the verso of the Rotterdam sheet, which, unlike the other related studies, is drawn only with the brush in light, feathery strokes, is a precursor to the pilgrim saint at right in the Uffizi composition. He too may have been taken from a model posed in the studio holding a rod. The array below of three male figures and three female ones seems unrelated. The second female from the left is either Mary Magdalene holding an ointment jar or possibly, but less likely considering the shape of the vessel, one of the Wise Virgins with an oil lamp. The male turned to the left holds a round unidentified object, possibly a stylized cap.

The verso of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen drawing bears an old attribution (‘Zorzon’) to Giorgione (1473/1474-1510), which was crossed out in favour of one to Antonio Vivarini (1415-1476/1484), to whom the Chicago drawing was also once given. When in the Sagredo collection, it was correctly classified as Venetian school (‘S.V.’= scuola veneziana, on the recto). It was first published in 1939 by James Byam Shaw with a tentative attribution to Vittore Carpaccio’s (c.1460/1465-1525/1526) son, Benedetto (documented c.1530-60). At around the same time, as recorded in a note on the mount and in an unpublished manuscript, Ulrich Middeldorf came to the conclusion that the Chicago drawing is by Benedetto Carpaccio.^[4] Benedetto remains a shadowy figure known primarily through a handful of paintings and without a secure corpus of drawings. Not even the study for an altarpiece in Copenhagen which is related to Benedetto’s painting Coronation of the Virgin with Four Saints of 1537 can be taken as a touchstone for his style because it is probably a copy by a workshop member after a lost composition by Vittore that was only later used by Benedetto as inspiration for his painting.^[5] 

Of the three drawings showing the Virgin and Child with Two Saints, the Rotterdam study, especially the recto and the upper half of the verso, is the most accomplished. Forms are mapped out with firm, sure strokes of the pen or brush and the figures are convincingly three-dimensional and interact in a psychologically credible manner. The figures on the verso’s lower register and the Chicago study, however, seem less skillfully drawn, with a fussy, hesitant broken line and vague, misunderstood anatomy, as for instance in the shaggy head of the figure on the far left (on the Rotterdam verso) or the drapery of the Virgin and of St Roch (Chicago). The Uffizi study on the other hand has all the hallmarks of an uninspired copy. Although the Rotterdam drawing has the strongest claim, at least in parts, to having been drawn by the master Vittore Carpaccio himself, the composition seems quite forward-looking, recalling sacra conversazione (holy conversation) arrangements developed in the 1520s by Palma Vecchio (1480-1528), suggesting a date when Benedetto and other members of the workshop were shouldering more of the commissions.^[6] It therefore seems prudent to keep the drawing as attributed to a leading younger member of the Carpaccio workshop, possibly Benedetto.