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The Sacrifice of Isaac

Attributed to Giovanni Battista Naldini
1537-1591

The Sacrifice of Isaac

4 x 3 inches (101 x 76 mm)
Pen and brown ink, black chalk, on laid paper; laid down on fragment of album page decorated with brown ink.
1993.170

Gift of Janos Scholz.

Notes
Watermark: none.
Description

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.
Inscriptions/Markings
Inscribed on album page, at upper center, in pen and brown ink, "168"; at lower center, in pen and brown ink, "di Andrea del Sarto".
Associated names
Warwick, George Guy Greville, Earl of, 1818-1893, former owner.
Holstein-Rathau, former owner.
Scholz, János, former owner.
Classification
Century Drawings
School
Department