The Sacrifice of Isaac

Although it does not correspond to a known work, the style of the present sheet permits a reasonable attribution to Naldini. A damaged chalk study by Naldini, now in the Uffizi, also depicts the Sacrifice of Isaac, though it differs from the Morgan drawing in composition, size, technique and viewpoint.¹ On the other hand, Isaac is, in both studies, positioned on similar altars and it is possible that the drawings were made in connection with the same project. In a more finished pen drawing of the same subject in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, Abraham looks up at the angel, rather than at his son, and his right arm is not raised, as it is in the Morgan study.² A further otherwise unrelated drawing by him, after a lost work of the same subject by Polidoro da Caravaggio, is preserved at Christ Church, Oxford.³

The drawing is close in style to such relatively late sheets by Naldini as a study of the Bath of Bathsheba that Edmund Pillsbury suggested may be connected to a painting of the early 1570s in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg.⁴

Footnotes:

1. Uffizi, Florence, inv. 8965S.
2. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, KdZ 17481; Barocchi 1964, 128-29.
3. Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford, inv. 0846; Byam Shaw 1976, 1: no. 208.
4. New Haven 1974, no. 30; Sotheby’s New York, 16 January 1985, lot 21.