drawing
- Museum number
- SL,5223.47
- Description
-
The Entombment of St Catherine, after (?) Aquila; three angels lowering her on a winding sheet, a sword and part of a wheel at right foreground
Pen and brown ink, with brown wash, heightened with white, over black chalk
- Production date
- 1511-1571 (?)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 245 millimetres
-
Width: 165 millimetres
- Curator's comments
- There is an engraving in the same direction by Cort (Bdh 126).
Lit: J.A. Gere and P. Pouncey, 'Italian drawings in the BM, Artists working in Rome', London, 1983, no. 235
Gere & Pouncey 1983
This composition is known in the form of various copies, drawn, painted and engraved. These last include an engraving in the same direction, dated 1575, by Cort (BdH 126) and one in reverse, listed by Bierens de Haan among the copies of Cort's and described by him, presumably on the strength of an inscription of some sort, as "par Pompeo Aquilani". There is no means of determining whether the old attribution of SL,5223.47 to Pompeo, which goes back at least as far as the General Inventory of 1837, was derived from the engraving or from some independent tradition.
Of the engravings listed by Bierens, this is the only one that provides any sort of clue to the authorship of the composition. Bierens, however, ignores this in favour of an attribution to Taddeo Zuccaro based on nothing more substantial than an old but weak drawn copy in the Uffizi (11207F ; Gernsheim 11398, repr. Coe, op. cit., p. 497). ascribed to Taddeo but bearing no stylistic relation to him: an error which Coe is inexplicably inclined to perpetuate. The apparently better-founded attribution to Pompeo dell'Aquila seems to us a convincing alternative. Though as a draughtsman he is an unknown quantity, the types of the angels and the whole style of the composition conform very satisfactorily with what we find in the engravings after him by his contemporary Orazio de Sanctis. The drawing itself, however, in its complete lack ot pentimenti, is at best a 'fair copy'; and there are certain weaknesses about it, notably in the arms of the centre angel, that lead us to doubt whether it is necessarily from Pompeo's own hand.
The copies of the composition also include painting by Zurbaran, in the Kansas City Gallery (repr. Coe, op. cit.), and a small painting on copper said by Coe to be dated on the back 1552. We cannot comment on this statement except to say that in photograph (BM) this part of the inscription is wholly illegible.
Literature: Bologna, op. cit., p. 97; R.T. Coe, Apollo, xcvi (1972), pp. 494ff.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1753
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- SL,5223.47
- Additional IDs
-
Miscellaneous number: A,20.47
