Provenance

Probably, William Bates (1824-1884), Birmingham (Lugt 2604) (a larger variant of

his mark faintly stamped in red ink at the lower right)

Anonymous sale: New York, Christie’s, 22 January 2003, lot 5, illustrated

Jean-Luc Baroni, London, from whom acquired by

Herbert Kasper (1926-2020), New York (his sale: New York, Christie’s, 14 October 2021, lot 27, illustrated)

Exhibitions

New York and London, Jean-Luc Baroni, Ltd., An Exhibition of Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2004, cat. no. 16, illustrated (catalogue by S. Ongpin)

New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, Mannerism and Modernism: The Kasper Collection of Drawings and Photographs, 2011, pp. 60-61, cat. no. 14, illustrated (entry by E. Baseggio Omiccioli)

Literature

E. Baseggio Omiccioli, “Paolo Farinati’s Design for the Banner of the Confraternity of the Artillerymen in Verona,” in Master Drawings, vol. L, no. 1, Autumn 2012, pp. 65-70, fig. 1

Drawn circa 1576

This handsome drawing is a study for a banner, or gonfalone, commissioned in 1576 by the Confraternity of the Artillerymen of Saint Barbara, Verona, as was discovered by Eveline Baseggio Omiccioli in her research for the 2011 Morgan exhibition of drawings from the collection of Herbert Kasper.¹  Executed in Farinati’s preferred technique of pen and brown ink with brown wash, heightened with white on ochre prepared paper, the drawing served as a modello, or finished compositional solution, which the artist would submit to his patrons, in this case the Veronese Confraternity of Artillerymen. The composition is simple, direct, and legible, easily read at a distance and, thus, fit to purpose for a banner used in religious processions and military parades.  

As Baseggio Omiccioli elegantly describes it, “the three main figures occupy the vertexes of an ideal triangle,” a device that Farinati used regularly in his mature paintings and drawings.²  Saint Barbara, the patron saint of the Confraternity, standing on the projecting cannon that separates her companions, crowns the composition as she holds her attributes: the tower in which she was imprisoned by her father, and a martyr’s palm frond. The two male saints serve as mirror images at the base of this pyramidal device: Saint Anthony Abbot, holding his tau-shaped stick and his bell, while a pig rests at his feet; Saint Roch, leaning on his staff, displays his pilgrim shell-badge on his cape and lifts his tunic to reveal the plague bruise on his thigh.  The figures are conceived monumentally and are largely drawn with the brush to create a more pictorial and less linear effect. The artist has emphasized his authorship by placing a barely visible small snail, his personal emblem, at the lower center of the composition.³

Farinati’s later years are well documented, thanks to the survival of his giornale, or account book, now preserved in the Archivio di Stato in Verona, that records the production of the artist’s workshop from 1573 until 1606.  Our drawing is one of the few drawings that can be connected with a lost work documented in this ledger. An entry in the giornale records that, on March 4, 1576, Farinati received a commission for a gonfalone from the Confraternità degli Bombardieri di S. Barbara that was to replace an older, existing banner.⁴  The precise description of the design in the ledger is identical to that of our drawing: “I made a contract […] to paint a banner for the Confraternity of the Artillerymen, on which it should be painted in oil Saint Barbara at the top and Saint Anthony and Saint Roch at the bottom, with a branch of golden foliage and golden planets as in the old banner.”⁵

Paolo Farinati, one of the most significant artists in sixteenth-century Verona, was active as a painter, architect, sculptor, and printmaker. However, it is as a draughtsman that Farinati is primarily celebrated today. Many of his drawings, as in the present example, are highly finished and appear almost as independent works of art. Already in the sixteenth century they were esteemed and sought after by contemporary collectors; Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) praised Farinati’s drawings lavishly,⁶  and the historian and family friend Carlo Ridolfi noted that “his drawings are greatly admired and are collected by connoisseurs.”⁷  The Louvre conserves the largest collection of the artist’s drawings, while a second significant group is at Windsor.