Miniatures

Model sheets and model books are rare. This one includes three, or perhaps four, separate groups lightly tinted in colors on a bifolium of parchment; note the fold through the center of the sheet. At the top is a Virgin and Child, half-length, in a heavenly sunburst, the Child blessing. A separate group on the right set together on a patch of green ground depicts a curly-haired and muscular Saint Sebastian tied to a tree, his body pierced with arrows, next to a bishop-saint identified by his mitre and crosier and dressed in a red chasuble over a blue alb. A bearded Saint Jerome on the far left, wearing his red cardinal’s hat and robe, appears to present a book (his Bible?) as he bends slightly forward toward a lay figure in profile (a donor?). The latter, a man, dressed in a brown cape and coiffed with a page-boy hairdo, kneels in prayer, his hat in hand below but facing Jerome. Both Jerome and the donor stand on separate green grounds. For this reason, they have been understood as separate compositions, to make a total of four, but their apparent interaction suggests rather that they make up a third grouping.

 

Model books initially drew the attention of scholars around the turn of the twentieth century, first by Wilhelm Vöge (1891) and then by Julius van Schlosser (1902), both of whom treated them as tools for artistic transmission in the Middle Ages. Since then, the extensive publication of pan-European examples led R. W. Scheller to gather the material together in a useful monograph in 1963, substantially revised and rewritten in 1995 as a catalogue of extant examples from c. 900 to c. 1450. Scheller’s study stops too early to include drawings such as the present one, but his summation of the genus “model book” and his review of the scholarship remains seminal. Based in part on their function, he distinguishes between collections of exempla, literally models on parchment, paper, or wood, and other types of sketches, such as those in the Renaissance artist’s workshop. Concrete evidence of the former, the exempla type, comes from a will drawn up in 1361 by the painter Jean Chatard of Lyons, who left to a pupil “all his parchment sheets of drawings, called patrons (patterns) to serve as examples for his paintings; and all materials relating to the painter’s craft, brushes as well as other material.” T he exempla type could include animals or figures, such as the Jacopo Bellini drawings, or decoration for manuscript illumination such as the Göttingen Model Book. The present drawing fits most likely into another distinct category singled out by Ulli Jenni as the “travel notebook” kept by artists on their journeys, such as the sheets in the Uffizi by an artist who traveled from the Low Countries to northern Italy via the Alps.

 

I think we can probably dismiss the imaginative theory offered in the Sotheby’s catalogue that the present set of sketches (models) are “arranged to form a coherent composition…a design for, or a copy from, an altarpiece in a Hieronymite church, dedicated to a bishop-saint, whose patron was a layman named Sebastian.” However, the cataloguer was certainly correct in stating that “the style is not easy to identify with confidence.” Without any actual comparisons, attributions both to southern Germany and to Italy have previously been advanced, both with some merit. On balance, I propose the hypothesis that this is a drawing by a provincial Italian artist familiar both with Lombard and Germanic styles, working (and perhaps traveling) in the Alpine regions of northern Italy in the Piedmont. Among his Lombard sources, the Virgin and Child derive from the much finer examples of Milanese manuscript production for the Visconti, which often depict the Virgin within the sunburst, or the radiant sun, that was one of the emblems of the Visconti. The profile donor is a type that enjoyed wide currency in Lombardy within the circle of the Visconti and later the Sforza in the last quarter of the century, page-boy haircut included. We can tentatively conclude that this is an artist who has looked at Lombard art of the fifteenth century, albeit from afar. German sources are also present. Compare, for example, Saint Sebastian on the present sheet with the same saint in this south German woodcut of the latter half of the fifteenth century. His curly blond hair, the articulation of the body, placement of the arrows, treatment of the loincloth, and even the detailing of the tree trunk have more in common with Germanic sources than with Italianate ones.

 

Another comparison suggests that our artist may have been copying altarpieces on his travels. An altar wing attributed to the anonymous Dutch painter, the Master of the Virgo inter Virgines (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, acc. no. 37.299) includes a bishop saint side-by-side Saint Sebastian, as in the present sheet (Fig. 7). A kneeling donor would fit well in the central panel of an altarpiece, as would the Virgin and Child blessing above in the heavens. While it seems to me unlikely that the figural groups are copied from the same large-scale painting, it does seem plausible that they are relatively finished sketches from monumental paintings the artist saw on his travels, which I propose were in the Alpine areas of northern Italy. Additional research may shed still further light on this intriguing and rare model sheet.

 

We are grateful to Gaudenz Freuler for his expertise.