{"id":2179,"date":"2011-11-23T15:06:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-23T19:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.vassar.edu\/rosso\/"},"modified":"2012-08-14T10:58:08","modified_gmt":"2012-08-14T14:58:08","slug":"d-29-study-of-lower-half-of-christ-in-glory","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/catalogues\/drawings\/d-29-study-of-lower-half-of-christ-in-glory\/","title":{"rendered":"D.29 Study for the Lower Half of the Christ in Glory"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

D. 29 COPY Study for the Lower Half of the "Christ in Glory"<\/p><\/div>\n

1528<\/p>\n

Rome, Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, no. F.C. 125607.<\/p>\n

Fig.D.29<\/a><\/p>\n

Black chalk, the face, neck, ear, and hair above the forehead of the woman at the left also in red chalk, 28.3 x 33.2 (the right edge of the scene marked by a line six or seven centimeters to the left of the right edge of the sheet); creased vertically left of center, stained at all four edges, and a small piece missing just below the center of the right edge; watermark, a sunburst with a face in the center, the encircling rays alternating straight-edged and curved, similar to Briquet 13947-13961.\u00a0 Inscribed in red chalk on the verso<\/em>: Del Rosso<\/em>.<\/p>\n

PROVENANCE: Corsini (see Grandi disegni<\/em>, [1981], below).<\/p>\n

LITERATURE:<\/p>\n

Carroll, 1961, 450, 451, Fig. 11, 453, as a copy of a lost drawing by Rosso for his picture in Citt\u00e0 di Castello.<\/p>\n

Carroll, 1964 (1976), I, Bk. I, 176-182, II, Bk. II, 286-290, D.27, Bk. III, Fig. 8, as a copy of a lost drawing; the \u201cAddition to the Preface,\u201d 1976, vii, as autograph.<\/p>\n

Forlani [1964], XXIX, 169, and no. 30, and Fig., as an autograph drawing by Rosso for his Christ in Glory<\/em>, adding that Petrucci thought it was a copy while Sinibaldi was inclined to see it as an original.<\/p>\n

Evelina Borea, in Primato del<\/em> disegno<\/em>, 1980, 191, under no. 453, as a copy of a lost drawing.<\/p>\n

Grandi disegni<\/em>, [1981], 42, as probably by Rosso.<\/p>\n

Darragon, 1983, 50, Fig. 29, as a copy of a lost drawing of 1528.<\/p>\n

Carroll, 1987, 25, 34, n. 66.<\/p>\n

Franklin, 1994, 202, 203, Pl. 161, as an anonymous copy of a lost drawing by Rosso for the Christ in Glory<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The drawing is clearly not copied from Rosso\u2019s Christ in Glory<\/em> (Fig.P.20a<\/a>) and yet is so closely related to it that it must be considered a study for the lower half of that altarpiece.\u00a0 The drawing includes that area of the lower part of the painting from the back of the woman standing at the left to the right edge of the panel; the area to the left of the standing woman in the painting that contains a crouching black man wearing a turban is not found in the drawing.\u00a0 (There is a very narrow strip of space here in the drawing in which something is drawn but not necessarily as part of the scene.)\u00a0 Also missing from the drawing is the male figure, facing forward and wearing a helmet, in the center of the picture, but a few faint lines indicating an arm and the drapery that the painted figure holds suggest that a figure was planned for this area.\u00a0 The small child seated in the lower right corner of the drawing is not found in the painting where, instead, there is a figure seen from the back holding a child.\u00a0 The two heavily draped men at the right stand closer together in the drawing.\u00a0 But the most significant difference lies in the posture of the figure right of center.\u00a0 In the drawing his body is seen from the side and slightly from the back, but his head is visible only from the back.\u00a0 His arms are flung forward toward the viewer of the picture and his legs are bent as he shifts his weight from the forward right foot to the inner left one.\u00a0 In the painting, the figure in this place has become a woman holding a child, who stands erect and making a short step into the scene.\u00a0 She is seen directly from the back with the head turned slightly to the left.\u00a0 In all other respects, except for a few variations of details – there are no chickens in the foreground of the drawing – the lower part of the painting and of the drawing are the same.\u00a0 But the change of this one figure alters the lower half of the picture from its original drama to a more architectonic support for the apparition above.<\/p>\n

The expert draughtsmanship of the drawing, it should be pointed out, appears much more incisive and the contrasts of light and shade seem greater in photographs than in the drawing itself, which is quite pale.\u00a0 The clearly drawn contours and the finely hatched shadows bring to mind the handling of some of Rosso\u2019s nude studies made in Rome (Fig.D.12<\/a>; Fig.D.16<\/a>), but the tight, and yet elastic and subtly varied contours of those simple figured drawings are quite different from the softer and more flexible outlines of the drawing in Rome related to the Christ in Glory<\/em>.\u00a0 The drawing most resembles Rosso\u2019s Allegory of the Immaculate Conception<\/em> in the Uffizi (Fig.D.32<\/a>), made for the Lagrime project very probably at the very beginning of Rosso\u2019s work on it late in 1528 into early 1529.\u00a0 This was very soon after the Christ in Glory<\/em> was commissioned on 1 July 1528.\u00a0 Both are compositional drawings in which the movement of the figures and the chiaroscuro of the draughtsmanship create a unification not required by the isolated figure drawings done in Rome.\u00a0 A better comparison would be with the one original St. Roch drawing, the St. Roch Distributing His Inheritance to the Poor<\/em> in the Louvre (Fig.D.13<\/a>).\u00a0 By 1528-1529, however, Rosso\u2019s style had been seriously reformed under the influence of Michelangelo\u2019s sculpture and drawing experienced by Rosso on a recent trip to Florence.\u00a0 After many years of thinking otherwise, it now seems to me that this study for the Christ in Glory<\/em> and the Uffizi Allegory of the Immaculate Conception<\/em> are autograph drawings.\u00a0 Their only real difference is the greater sharpness and finer shading of the study for the altarpiece that would be executed in oil, and the slightly broader draughtsmanship of the drawing intended as a study for a fresco.<\/p>\n

The drawing in Rome has to be seen with the copy in the Uffizi (D.28<\/a>) of a lost study for the lower part of the same painting.\u00a0 Both drawings, the original in Rome and the lost original of the copy, would have been done shortly after 1 July 1528, when the Christ in Glory <\/em>was commissioned, and shortly after a trip that Rosso took to Florence after completing the Piet\u00e0<\/em> in Borgo Sansepolcro in 1527-1528 (Fig.P.19a<\/a>).\u00a0 Both show the influence of Michelangelo\u2019s most recent art that can also be seen in Rosso\u2019s immediately subsequent Allegory of the Immaculate Conception<\/em>, mentioned above, done for S. Maria delle Lagrime in Arezzo at the beginning of Rosso\u2019s work on that project commissioned on 28 November 1528.\u00a0 The style of the drawing in Rome and the Allegory<\/em> drawing is different from that of the Sansepolcro Piet\u00e0<\/em>, the particular Michelangelesque aspects of which seem to reflect an earlier trip to Florence made late in 1527 or early in 1528, and different, too, from the style of the later Lagrime designs, the Throne of Solomon<\/em> (Fig.D.34<\/a>) and the Allegory of the Virgin<\/em> (Fig.D.33Aa<\/a>) of 1529.\u00a0 The Christ in Glory<\/em> as executed in 1529-1530 shows changes in the lower half of its composition from what appears in the Rome drawing toward a greater symmetry comparable to the formality that appears in the later Lagrime compositions.\u00a0 The autograph drawing in Rome would date before the late summer or early autumn of 1528 when Rosso became ill and left Citt\u00e0 di Castello.<\/p>\n

Accepted as Rosso\u2019s, the study in Rome becomes the only drawing by him in Italy that uses red chalk in one detail.\u00a0 Many of Rosso\u2019s red chalk drawings are done on an underdrawing in black chalk.\u00a0 Shortly thereafter, however, in his early French St. Jerome<\/em> (Fig.D.45a<\/a>), he allows the pre-drawing black chalk to remain to have its own effect on the finished work.\u00a0 But this combination was never as fully realized as it appears in one detail in the study of 1528.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

See COPY, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, no. A3135, Copy(?) of the figures of the Magdalen and the Virgin<\/em>, under P.20, Christ in Glory<\/em>, as possibly copied from a lost drawing by Rosso for his altarpiece in Citt\u00e0 di Castello (Fig.P.20Copy, Amsterdam<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1528 Rome, Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, no. F.C. 125607. Fig.D.29 Black chalk, the face, neck, ear, and hair above the forehead of the woman at the left also in red chalk, 28.3 x 33.2 (the right edge of the scene marked by a line six or seven centimeters to the left of the right edge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"parent":820,"menu_order":31,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2179","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2179"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6391,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2179\/revisions\/6391"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}