January 2009

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Drawings by Jacopo da Empoli
The elegant artificiality of some of the Tuscan Mannerist drawings discussed in the March issue of apollo30 stands in marked contrast to the four sheets here identified as by a long-living and luminous painter of the Florentine Counter-Reformation, Jacopo da Empoli (1551-1640), but these drawings are presently housed in different parts of the collections at the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden. The earliest (Fig. 8) is easily overlooked, as it is a study of a recumbent youth drawn in red chalk on white paper, which is pasted with a scattering of unrelated drawings in Album no. Ca 2; the original sheet was cropped along its entire silhouette by the early collector, before pasting it onto the album page of blue paper. It is, therefore, tempting to baptise this early settecento collector, curator or restorer, the ‘master of the Wagner Albums,’ given that his work is so distinctive.31 The figural type, the details of outlined folds of flesh on the stomach, and the technique are all precisely comparable to the well-accepted red chalk study of a recumbent youth (Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome, fc 125441), which was preparatory for the figure of Adam in Empoli’s altarpiece of the Allegory of the Immaculate Conception (S. Agostino, Prato), documented to 1588.

In a box of ‘Unbekannte Meister’ is another sheet (Fig. 10) already annotated with old attributions to Jacopo da Empoli, which one can here confidently corroborate. This composition sketch in pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, over black chalk, portrays the Coronation of the Virgin; the lower register includes four male hermit saints (from left to right, St Jerome, St Francis?, St Anthony Abbot?, and St John the Baptist), and female martyr saints in the back-ground. It can be dated to c. 1606, around the time of the Assumption with Saints altarpiece (S Margherita, Cortona), while the watermark of a grand-ducal crown with the giglio of the Florentine republic (near Briquet 4844) confirms that the paper dates from at least c. 1580, or after, and that it is of Lucchese origin.

A companion in this same box is a sheet of very different date and character, but no less typical of Empoli (Fig. 9), a beautiful, portrait-like study from life, drawn in his typical, mature technique of black chalk on light gray-brown paper, to my eye closely comparable to the portraits seen in two of Empoli’s paintings, the St Carlo Borromeo and the Rospigliosi Family (church of S Domenico, Pistoia), of c. 1613, and the Honesty of St. Eligius (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), of c. 1614.36 The figure sketched at right in this drawing is uncharacteristic of Empoli’s anatomical types, and may be an insertion by a different artist.

A monumental life study in red chalk of a standing nude youth with a wreath, and holding a staff (Fig. 11), has lingered incorrectly in a confused limbo of attributions (‘Boscoli?’ and ‘Empoli?’), to judge from annotations on the mount. Both the subject matter and style of drawing indicate that this study was probably undertaken in connection with Empoli’s ambitious, much reprised painting of the Drunkenness of Noah, in c. 1615-20;37 it is like preparatory studies in red chalk for the picture, but the newly identified sheet, more interestingly, seems to quote the pose of Michelangelo’s marble Bacchus of the 1490s (Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence). Empoli recast the pose by studying it from life, using a garzone in the workshop. This sheet can also be related to a further study by Empoli (Uffizi, Florence, 9352f), recently discussed by Anna Forlani Tempesti, that reprises the pose of Jacopo Sansovino’s marble Bacchus.