Studies for Various Subjects

Summary

A reproduction produced by the Vasari Society of a drawing from the French School. The drawing shows two figures; a woman is kneeling beside a small altar in left half of the composition and a man is standing in the right. The altar faces towards the left corner of the composition, and the woman kneels behind it with her body facing in this direction while her head is turned back towards the right. It is not clear whether these two figures occupy the same space or whether they are two unrelated sketches on the same piece of paper, but if they were in the same space the woman's direction could be explained by her turning to acknowledge the man. The woman has her right hand on the altar and her left hand resting on her right wrist. There is a halo of lines emanating from her head. The man's body is masked by a round object from the waist downwards. He is holding both his hands slightly forwards of his body and in his right hand he is holding a sceptre. The artist has not drawn in the face of either figure. Nos. 12 and 14 are grouped together in the text from the accompanying booklet produced by the Vasari Society: "Nos. 12, 13 FRENCH SCHOOL (?) (About 1420) British Museum, 1895.9.15.589. (From the Thane, Lawrence, Woodburn, J. C. Robinson, and Malcolm Collections.) Pen and bistre. 17.3 x 16.7 cm. (6 3/4 x 6 1/2 in.) 12. Two subjects apparently disconnected, viz. a woman and a young girl within an open arbour or pergola, the one seated and the other kneeling, both busy with what look like bunches of grapes, of which the young girl is putting one away into a bag. To the right, outside the pergola, a standing figure of a long-bearded, heavily draped man, resembling an apostle or evangelist. At foot two hexameter lines: Hinc rerum vertigo oritur, sic leta dolendis Sors hominum alternat variatque volubilis orbem - apparently refering to a design of Fortune's wheel, which was presumably on part of the sheet which is now cut away. The handwriting of the couplet is pronounced by palaeographers to be French. 13. (On an irregularly shaped sheet pasted at the back of no. 12.) A figure of the Virgin kneeling, with reverted head, at a desk, in an attitude frequent in Flemish and Rhenish pictures of the Annunciation; and beside her a little in the rear, where the angel of the Annunciation would naturally be expected, the upper part of the figure of a man, apparently a king, holding out (not the Annunciation lily, but) a sceptre terminating in a fleur-de-lis. The faces of both figures have been defaced. The drawings, both on the front and the back sheets, are very attractive, especially the pergola scene on the front, and at the same time extremely puzzling. The colour of the ink is identical in both cases, and the management of the pen nearly so; hence it is probable, though not quite certain, that both sheets are made by one hand. The style is in neither case properly Italian, nor Flemish, nor French, and even the costumes in the pergola scene seem ambiguous. But on the whole the style of the drawings as well as the character of the handwriting seem to point to Northern France, Artois, or the nearest adjacent parts of Flanders. No one who has studied the sheet has yet been able to explain or find an analogy for the pergola scene. The king with the fleur-de-lis sceptre, on the reverse, should according to all analogy be St. Louis; but occurring on the same sheet with his patroness the Virgin, it is he and not she whom we should expect to find in the posture of prayer and reverence. ... S. C."