Study for a St Sebastian

Author: Klazina Botke

Empoli is seen as one of the most important representatives of Counter-Reformation art in Florence. Some five hundred drawings by his hand have survived, the majority of them now in the Uffizi. The figure on this sheet, with his hands tied behind his back and his eyes cast up to heaven, was set down with an assured touch, with strong outlines and swift parallel hatching for the shading. The subtle accents with white highlights on ochre brown prepared paper give the figure even more volume. Empoli preferred dark grounds that served as the mid-tone. Drawing on this carte tinte was a specialism in his workshop.^[1]

This drawing is a study for The Martyrdom of St Sebastian in the Aldobrandini Chapel in San Lorenzo in Florence.^[2] Pietro Aldobrandini had the chapel modernized during his cardinalship (1593-1621) and probably commissioned this painting then.^[3] According to Marabottini (1988), the work ties in well stylistically with Empoli’s later period. The canvas and the preliminary drawing can therefore both be dated around 1615 to 1620.^[4] Notably, Empoli depicts the moment when the saint, prior to his execution, is bound hand and foot to a stake. The artist departed here from the more usual image of the dying saint’s body pierced with arrows. According to Baldinucci, Empoli originally intended to add an archer, but after several experiments he omitted the executioner.^[5] The viewer is now challenged to contemplate the dramatic event that is about to happen. This idea reflected the thinking of the Counter-Reformation movement, which in Italy sought for new ways to arouse viewers’ empathy in the visual arts.^[6]

Empoli probably based the figure’s pose on the San Sebastiano of Il Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, c.1477-1549). In Jacopo’s lifetime, this altarpiece was in the Compagnia di San Sebastiano in Siena.^[7] A preliminary study by Empoli, now in Florence, is of an earlier step in the creative process, where the figure is more obviously based on Sodoma’s Sebastian.^[8] The artist squared that drawing in order to transfer the design to a different sheet of paper. We see the result in a second drawing in Florence and in the Rotterdam drawing: the same figure’s upper body is now shown in reverse, as it appears in the final painting.^[9] The position of the foot is slightly different in these two drawings and there is no cloth behind the tied hands in the Rotterdam variant, but there is a sketchily indicated loincloth.

On the verso of the Rotterdam sheet there are a number of figure studies in red and black chalk: a right and a left arm, a right leg together with a second, simpler sketch of the leg, a recumbent nude figure, a seated figure and a study of a torso with highly exaggerated musculature. This last appears to be a study of a Classical sculpture. There is no connection between these studies and the St Sebastian on the other side.