Head of a Bearded Man

Author: Rhoda Eitel-Porter

A highly successful Venetian painter and leader of a large workshop, Vittore Carpaccio produced numerous altarpieces but also smaller devotional works for patrons in Venice and its territories. Carpaccio used this study for the figure of St Peter (fig.) in an oil on panel painting that is part of a large polyptych once in the cathedral Sant’Anastasia of Zara, or Zadar, now in southwestern Croatia, but then the Venetian administrative centre in Dalmatia. The polyptych was moved and has been in Zara since 1976.^[1] As in the painting, the drawing shows a middle-aged man, with a prominent nose, taut neck muscles and tendons, and carefully delineated curls and trimmed beard. The lines fade out towards the bottom of the page, suggesting this was only ever intended as a study for a bust-length figure rather than having been cut down. 

The distinctive features impart a portrait-like quality to the drawing, but like other Carpaccio head studies the Rotterdam drawing was used on at least two occasions: it also appears in the form of the central apostle in Carpaccio’s painting The Death of the Virgin in Ferrara, where however the figure is slightly more idealized, having a less bulbous nose.^[2] The painting, which is signed and dated 1508 on a cartellino (an illusionistic piece of paper) at the bottom, reveals the additive nature of some of Carpaccio’s work – the figures are seemingly lifted from different contexts and assembled here without interacting or being placed in a coherent relationship to each other.

The dating of the Zara polyptych varies widely, but in a well-reasoned text from 2016 Sara Menato makes a convincing case for c.1487 to 1496, or even more probably 1493, which would also be the likely date for the drawing.^[3] Three drawings, two in New York, and one in Paris, can be related to the Zara polyptych. The study in New York of an old man kneeling to the right was likely meant for the figure of St Jerome in a central panel of the Zara altarpiece.^[4] A pen-and-ink drawing of St Martin and the Beggar, also in New York, is a study for a lower central panel and underscores how Carpaccio predominantly used pen and ink for compositional drawings, preferring chalk on coloured paper for exploring the facial features of his figures in bust-length studies.^[5]

The Head of a Bearded Man, Facing Left in Paris^[6] has in the past been associated with the figure of St Simeon in Zara. Yet it also relates, albeit less closely, to the fifth apostle from the right standing prominently near the feet of the dead Virgin in the Ferrara painting in addition to bearing some resemblance to the figure of St Simeon in The Calling of St Matthew in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice. Although Carpaccio predominantly used blue paper for such drawings, both the Rotterdam sheet and the Paris drawing are on a buff paper, with individual fibres visible. This seems to be the original colour of the paper, but blue paper has been known occasionally to fade to a buff or tan colour. The two drawings share a provenance going all the way back to the seventeenth century, suggesting they originated at a similar moment and under similar circumstances.