The Labourers in the Vineyard

Author: Mees Knarren

This scene illustrates a parable related in Matthew’s gospel, 20:1-16. A landowner spent a day looking for people who were prepared to work in his vineyard. The day has now come to an end and they are all being paid the same amount for their work although not all of them have put in the full number of hours. The moral of the story is that even those who only convert to the true faith at the end of their lives will go to heaven.

The drawing is a copy after a fresco by Andrea del Sarto for Santissima Annunziata in Florence. The story of the labourers was illustrated in two murals in the monastery, the first showing the landowner looking for workers, the second with them being paid. This Rotterdam sheet is a copy after the second fresco. There are five figures in rural surroundings with swaying grass and a few buildings. The landowner is standing on a pile of hay to the right of centre, towering over his workers. He is paying them for their labour, but three of them appear to be complaining, while the fourth, just outside the group, seems to be perfectly content with what is probably a generous reward. Del Sarto’s two grisaille frescoes painted on the walls of the monastery garden around 1510-14 are now lost. The prevailing taste for church interiors in Florence was fairly sober, as prescribed by the authoritative artist and architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), although he was less strict about frescoes on outside walls.^[1] In addition, Shearman pointed out in 1960 that Del Sarto’s series was an innovative type of fresco in which the subject fitted its location: a narrative being played out in a vineyard in a monastery garden.^[2] Del Sarto often used people he knew for his figures, among them an elderly bearded man whom he depicted in a drawing in Oxford^[3] and a painting in Madrid.^[4] The central figure in his fresco for Santissima Annunziata may be the same man.^[5] Del Santo also worked from classical models, and the famous Apollo Belvedere may have given him the idea for the figure on the far right.^[6]

Although the art collector Adriaan Domela Nieuwenhuis described this drawing in his inventory as a Del Sarto, it is very probably not by him at all.^[7] It is not the only sheet to record his lost fresco. In Paris there is a drawing that used to be attributed to him but is now considered to be by an anonymous Florentine artist.^[8] Only the second man from the left is singled out in a sheet in the same collection, and although it too is attributed to Del Sarto, it is in fact an anonymous copy.^[9] In Paris there is another study that was thought to be by Federico Zuccaro (1540/1541-1609), but has now been reduced to the anonymous ranks as well. An inscription states that this drawing was made after Del Sarto’s fresco in Santissima Annunziata.^[10] Northern European artists copied the vineyard series as well. Hieronymus Cock (1518-1570), for instance, based two engravings on Del Sarto’s works, only the first of which has survived. However, it is not clear whether he based his design on the fresco itself or on a copy after it. A later, 1563 edition of that print by Cornelis Cort (1533-1578) can be seen in London.^[11] Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) made two drawings after the fresco, one of which ended up in Paris,^[12] and the other in the former Normand collection.^[13] The one in Paris has an inscription stating that Rubens drew what Andrea del Sarto had already painted. According to Jeremy Wood, Rubens may have made his drawings directly from Del Sarto’s fresco. If that is the case, it could only have been lost after Rubens’s visit to Florence in 1601. Wood also stated that Erasmus Quellinus the Younger (1607-1678) based his drawing on one of Rubens’s versions.^[14] An anonymous and less detailed copy is to be seen in Edinburgh.^[15] In sum: Del Sarto’s frescoes were copied often and widely spread over a fairly long period, with the Rotterdam drawing being one of the earlier ones from the second half of the sixteenth century.

The Rotterdam drawing was made with brown ink on prepared paper and is in poor condition. Ultraviolet light reveals that it was executed with greater subtlety than is apparent to the naked eye. The damage caused by exposure to light and the depredation of insects also show that the drawing must have been framed for a long time. It could have been kept as a memento of Del Sarto’s frescoes, with the main focus being on his use of chiaroscuro, the device that is central to Vasari’s description of his vineyard.^[16] The same dramatic effect is achieved in the Rotterdam drawing through a combined application of ink and white heightening.