Figures on Clouds, Seen From Below

Both this and a related drawing in the Morgan’s collection, are likely by the same hand after a section on the western face of Correggio’s fresco in the cupola of Parma Cathedral, which he was commissioned to decorate between 1526 and 1530.¹ Inv. IV, 39 is quite close to Correggio’s working drawings, which were customarily traced with some portions drawn free-hand, such as a sheet in the Staedelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.² However, as A. E. Popham argued, the present drawing’s connection with the present study – more clearly weaker and later in execution – precludes its claim as autograph.³ In particular, it is worth noting the tentative execution of one of the most dynamic figures in the fresco, namely the “exposed” angel, seen from below.

As Popham observed, the two Morgan sheets are larger than the Frankfurt study and differ from the scale on which Correggio typically drew (unpublished letter to Morgan curators, 1952). Moreover, Popham noted that the scale of Morgan drawings correspond with Giovanni Battista Vanni’s reproductive engraving of the same section of Correggio’s fresco, adding that the Morgan sheets might be Vanni’s preparatory studies. The two Morgan drawings make up both halves of the engraving and, as Rhoda Eitel-Porter noted, come closer to the print than the fresco. Eitel-Porter also observed that the drawn and engraved figures are more sharply foreshortened and in the present drawing, as in Vanni’s print, the draftsman has shifted the angel at upper right to fill the space of an area of the fresco that was not reproduced.

Footnotes:

1. Morgan Library & Museum, New York, inv. IV, 39.
2. Staedelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, inv. 595. See Popham 1957, 160, no. 54.
3. Popham 1957, 73, 188.