2002.95.107: A Vision of Saint Jerome

This anonymous drawing originated in the artistic circle of Pieter de Jode the Elder, who was based in Antwerp. The draftsman, printmaker, and publisher occasionally depicted Saint Jerome in his drawings and prints.¹ The drawing’s small scale, devotional subject matter, and the manner of draftsmanship—with its extensive application of brown wash, precise contours, and the use of parallel hatching—recall examples from De Jode’s oeuvre in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, the Rijksprentenkabinet, and a private collection in Belgium.² However, these aspects are not close enough to De Jode’s hand to attribute this drawing securely to him.

The composition is squared and incised, suggesting that the artist intended to use the drawing as a model for a print. The corresponding work has not yet been identified.³ The indentations follow the lines of the drawing meticulously, with the exception of the second galero (cardinal’s hat), hanging on the wall behind Saint Jerome. When the drawing was examined under the microscope, it became clear that this is not an earlier exploratory sketch but a later addition, drawn in graphite after the incising campaign. This shows that the artist, who had initially placed the galero in the left foreground, experimented with a new position for the hat at this late stage in the production of the work. To replace the galero at left, he drew an hourglass and a book—two other attributes commonly associated with Saint Jerome—which are faintly visible with the naked eye.⁴

Marjolein Leesberg first noticed that the unusual iconography of the crucifix, floating on a cloud and surrounded by the three Theological Virtues, can also be found in an etching from Jan de Bisschop’s Paradigmata Graphices series (G1281) .⁵ As the inscription on that print indicates, the work relates to a painting by Federico Zuccaro executed in 1586, during his brief stint in the service of Philip II at El Escorial.⁶ The source for De Bisschop’s etching was not the painting itself—which did not please the patron and was repainted by Juan Gómez shortly after its conception—but a drawn preparatory study by Zuccaro.⁷ According to J. G. van Gelder, it seems certain that “all the drawings reproduced in the Paradigmata were at the time in the Northern Netherlands,” and were used by De Bisschop directly in preparing his etchings. Thus, the connection with De Bisschop suggests that, in the 17^th century, Zuccaro’s drawing belonged to a collection in the Low Countries.⁸

Since De Bisschop’s series was published only in 1671, the etching could not have served as a model for the Harvard drawing, which, stylistically, belongs to the early decades of the 17^th century. Rather, just like De Bisschop, the author of the Harvard sheet is likely to have had access to the Zuccaro drawing itself, and appropriated the innovative motif of the crucifix for his own composition with Saint Jerome.⁹ Because the Escorial painting and probably the drawing were produced by Zuccaro in 1586, that year serves as the earliest possible date for the production of the Harvard sheet.

Notes

¹ My thanks to Marjolein Leesberg and William W. Robinson, who proposed this identification in private correspondence (email messages between Leesberg, Robinson, and the author, November 2016). For images of Saint Jerome in De Jode’s oeuvre, see Hollstein 21, no. 92, p. 27; and The Adoration of the Lamb, brown ink and brown wash, 159 × 100 mm, Belgium, private collection, in From Floris to Rubens: Master Drawings from a Belgian Private Collection, ed. Stefaan Hautekeete (Ghent: Snoeck, 2016), pp. 212–13.

² The Annunciation, brown ink with brown wash and white opaque watercolor, 158 × 98 mm, Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, KdZ 30129; Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter, black chalk, black and brown ink with gray and brown wash, and white opaque watercolor, 317 × 191 mm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, RP-T-1953-98; and The Adoration of the Lamb, brown ink and brown wash, 159 × 100 mm, Belgium, private collection, seen in Hautekeete, pp. 212–13. No extensive study of De Jode’s drawings exists. For an overview of his draftsmanship, see catalogue entries in Marijn Schapelhouman, Nederlandse tekeningen omstreeks 1600/Netherlandish Drawings circa 1600 (’s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1987), pp. 60–75.

³ I am grateful to Marjolein Leesberg for confirming that no print related to the drawing is known to her (email message to William W. Robinson and the author, November 16, 2016).

⁴ My thanks to Penley Knipe, the Philip and Lynn Straus Senior Conservator of Works on Paper and head of the paper lab in the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, for studying the work with me using the microscope and a video spectral comparator.

⁵ Email message to William W. Robinson and the author, November 16, 2016.

⁶ For Zuccaro’s El Escorial commission and related drawings, see Rosemarie Mulcahy, Philip II of Spain: Patron of the Arts (Dublin and Portland, Ore.: Four Courts, 2004), pp. 229–54. Zuccaro himself discussed the element of the crucifix, painted “in a manner quite different from the ordinary,” in a letter to an unnamed friend. See ibid., pp. 236–37.

⁷ Federico Zuccaro, St. Jerome, brown ink and brownish-gray wash with white opaque watercolor on blue-green paper, 392 × 261 mm, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, NM 450/1863. For De Bisschop’s Vision of St. Jerome, see Jan G. van Gelder and Ingrid Jost, Jan de Bisschop and His Icones and Paradigmata: Classical Antiquities and Italian Drawings for Artistic Instruction in Seventeenth-Century Holland, 2 vols. (Doornspijk, Davaco: 1985), vol. 1, p. 275. Van Gelder and Joost were not aware of the Stockholm drawing and had assumed that De Bisschop’s plate records Zuccaro’s composition underneath Gómez’s overpainting.

⁸ Jan G. van Gelder, “Jan de Bisschop 1628–1671,” Oud Holland 86 (4): 225–26; Van Gelder and Jost, Jan de Bisschop and His Icones and Paradigmata, pp. 66–67, 231–81. The Zuccaro drawing was sold to Count Tessin during the Pierre Crozat sale in 1741 (lot no. 204 or 210). See Per Bjürstrom and Börje Magnusson, Italian Drawings: Umbria, Rome, Naples (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1998), n.p., no. 579. It has not been possible to determine the sheet’s earlier provenance.

⁹ Notably, in the Harvard drawing, two Theological Virtues—Faith and Hope—are accompanied by their traditional attributes, a cross and an anchor, which are not included in the Stockholm sheet. The motif of the crucifix is also placed on the opposite side of the composition and is drawn in reverse.