The Temptation of St Anthony

Author: Albert Elen

The nucleus of Domenico Tintorettto’s surviving drawings consists of 90 oil sketches on paper, which were acquired by the British Museum in 1907 as a homogeneous group, mounted in a late seventeenth-century collector’s album.^[1] This so-called Del Carpio album was subsequently dismembered and the drawings were individually mounted.^[2] First believed to be the work of the artist’s father, based on the inscription ‘DISEGNI DE GIACOME TINTORETTO Raccolti in Roma […]’ on the album’s title page, the entire group was recognized as Domenico’s by Von Hadeln (1922, 1926). His attribution was supported by Tozzi Pedrazzi (1937) and by Hans Tietze and Erika Tietze-Conrat, who individually listed them in their handbook of Venetian drawings (1944).^[3] At least 24 more drawings belong to the same group, now scattered among print rooms, including four in Rotterdam, all from the Koenigs Collection (I 542-545).^[4] The latter four were probably acquired as a set by the collector Koenigs, to judge by his successive inventory numbers, but their provenance is unfortunately unknown. This particular drawing was seriously damaged and the top left and lower right corners have later been repaired and the drawing completed.

Certain subjects in this substantial group of oil sketches appear in many variations, some of which are in reverse, in whole or in part. The subject of our drawing, the temptation of St Anthony, either harassed by women or by beasts, or both, appears most frequently: 35 times in the album alone and also in two other drawings from the Koenigs Collection (I 542, 544).^[5] Most are horizontal compositions and a few are squared for transfer to another sheet for further elaboration, like the drawing now in Moscow (I 544). Most of the St Anthony sketches appear to have been made as study material only, exploring various possibilities for depicting this particular subject, only four having been identified as preparatory for a painting.^[6]

The composition centres on the hermit saint who, according to the Legenda Aurea and his biography by St Athanasius, had renounced all his worldly goods to live in poverty and seclusion in the desert. He is surrounded by demons, those prominently placed in the foreground disguised as naked women, making the saint tempting offers, the other bystanders harassing him. The kneeling female nude on the left foreground in our drawing, seen from the back, is also found in one of the London drawings, the kneeling saint in exactly the same pose in another.^[7] Several of the St Anthony sketches, including ours, have the same seated nude woman on the right, with the bent left leg lowered, the arms clinging to the pulled-up right leg, which rests on one or two cushions, making various gestures in communication with the saint seated or kneeling on the ground between them.^[8] The four or five figures standing in the background vary and sometimes include one wearing a crown, as in our drawing I 542.^[9]