Studies for 'The Nativity'

Author: Rosie Razzall

This drawing is a typical example of one of Figino’s restless preparatory studies, where he filled a sheet with repetitions of figures, redrawing the poses many times in new variations. In this sheet he worked on the figures for his Nativity, one of the subjects shown on four large canvases painted for the organ shutters of Milan cathedral (fig.). The other paintings depict Moses, the Crossing of the Red Sea and the Ascension. Figino won the competition for this prestigious commission on 7 June 1590, and although he was delayed in starting the project due to illness, he had completed the shutters by 1595 and they were installed at the cathedral a few years later. The figure of the Virgin leaning over the Christ Child is repeated on this sheet four times, and the admiring St Joseph, who was eventually rotated to face the viewer in the final painting, is also redrawn several times. These figures are accented with white heightening, which stands out on the blue paper and gives them volume, while other supplementary figures are only laid out in brief graphite lines. In the lower corner, Figino experimented with the arrangement of the drapery at the Virgin’s waist.

Figino developed the figures for The Nativity in a number of other drawings, several of which are also made on blue paper of roughly the same dimensions.^[1] In a drawing in New York,^[2] he worked on the figure of the Virgin and her clothing at a larger scale, as well as the arms and hands of saints and angels. In another drawing in Windsor he refined the figures of the angels.^[3] Further drawings are in Lisbon,^[4] Oxford,^[5] Milan,^[6] Venice^[7] and Windsor,^[8] including studies for the whole composition, groups and individual figures. The number of surviving sheets shows the extent to which he used drawing to prepare fastidiously for his painting commissions.

Despite an Italian inscription identifying the artist and commission, which must have been added before the sheet passed through a number of prestigious English collections in the eighteenth century, by the time the sheet was acquired by Franz Koenigs it had strangely lost its attribution.^[9] During a visit to the museum in 1957 Philip Pouncey proposed it again as a Figino. Torrini included it in the appendix to her catalogue of the Figino drawings in Venice, and it has since been returned to the Figino literature.^[10]