Studies for a Council Scene

Veronese School

Summary

A reproduction produced by the Vasari Society of a drawing from the Veronese School. The drawing shows a man wearing robes and a hat sitting on a platform in the centre of the composition with three men sitting on a bench on either side of him and crowds of men standing behind each bench. The general arrangement of the composition is symmetrical. The men sitting on the bench on the left of the composition are wearing monk's habits, while those on the right - and those in the crowds behind - are wearing robes and caps. Some of the men are turned towards each other suggesting a conversation, but most are looking towards the centre of the composition; the focus of the scene is the man seated in the middle. This man is turning to address the men on the bench to the left, and he has his right hand genturing towards them. Nos. 7 and 8 in this set of Vasari prints appear on the same mounting paper. Similarly their texts in the accompanying booklet are grouped together. Text from the accompanying booklet produced by the Vasari Society: "Nos. 7, 8 VERONESE SCHOOL (?) (Early Fifteenth Century) STUDIES FOR A COUNCIL-SCENE British Museum, 1885. 5. 9. 36 and 37. (From Richardson, jun., and Edward Peart Collections.) Pen and bistre on pink prepared paper. 11.9 x 17.3 cm. (4 5/8 x 6 ¾ in.) and 10.5 x 15.8 cm. (4 ¼ x 6 ¼ in.) 7. Two groups of three doctors each, in civil habit, seated nearly facing each other. 8. A doge addressing a council of doctors, six apparently of canon law, dressed in monkish habit and seated below him to right and left in two groups of three while other doctors (or civil law?) in lay habit stand grouped behind a rail or barrier a little farther back on each side. These two drawings, and the following in Mr. Bateson’s collection [1932.71.9], bear on their backs inscriptions in the hand of Jonathan Richardson connecting them positively with a picture by Benozzo Gozzoli of the Dispute of the Doctors ‘painted in oil and hung on a pilaster of the Duomo of Pisa’. The only picture of that subject now remaining in the Duomo at Pisa is the altar-piece by Francesco Vanni, to which these drawings obviously bear no relation in point of date. But a Triumph of St. Thomas by Benozzo Gozzoli, now in the Louvre, was formerly in the same church, and it must be of this picture that Richardson was thinking. His identification, however, made no doubt from memory, was mistaken, and the drawings bear no relation to Benozzo Gozzoli’s paintings in question. Neither do they belong to the Florentine School at all, but to the Venetian or Veronese. The debate or dispute represented is evidently one which took place at Venice; witness, in no. 8, the figure of the Doge, who presides in his ducal cap and ermine. Possibly the subject may belong to the series illustrating the part taken by Venice in the famous quarrel between the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and popes Adrian IV and Alexander III, in the twelfth century, which was painted over and over again by successive generations of artists in the Hall of the Great Council at Venice. Another sheet, in the same style and technique and very probably by the same hand, attributed in the British Museum to Vittore Pisano, certainly represents two subjects from that series (the fight outside the Porta Sant’ Angelo, and the mission of the Emperor’s son Otho entreating his father to make peace). All these drawings are remarkable by their mixture of archaic style and fashions with lively individual character and expression in the faces. They cannot well date from later than the first quarter in the fifteenth century, and may perhaps represent a phase of Veronese art between the period of Altichieri and that of Vittore Pisano. It should be noted, however, that figures almost exactly similar to some of these doctors already occur in a Venetian fourteenth-century MS. Of Livy to which attention has lately been called … S. C.”