A sheet of figure studies

Few drawings capture so well the moment of artistic creation as Paolo Veronese’s pen sketches, of which the Kasper drawing is a compelling and particularly large example. Veronese’s main focus in these sketches is the poses of single figures or groups of figures and the way they relate to each other and interact, superimposing pentimento upon pentimento, as in the male figure at lower center of the present work, whose legs are drawn several times, and whose head is also repeated twice. Seemingly random in the way the figures are jotted down, these study sheets may at first appear bewildering, but the patient viewer will feel rewarded when starting to discover connections and variations in the multitude of figures, and when feeling he is allowed an insight into the artist’s febrile mind at the moment he commits to paper his ideas for the first time.

Published only in 2010, the year the drawing was acquired by Kasper, Gloria Gallucci (op. cit.) immediately recognized that a large number of the figures relate to the master’s large painting (173 x 365 cm) of David anointed by Samuel in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. 40 (fig. 1; see T. Pignatti and F. Pedrocco, Veronese, Milan, 1995, I, no. 51, ill.; Salomon, op. cit., p. 55, no. 4, fig. 35). This and other paintings were among the first monumental works that the artist made after his first success as a young artist in his twenties; the picture in Vienna has been dated as early as around 1550, and as late as 1558. As Gallucci acknowledged herself (op. cit., p. 337), the connection she suggested with the decorations of Andrea Palladio’s Villa Maser of the early 1560s (Pignatti and Pedrocco, op. cit., no. 123, ill.) are much less obvious, and indeed have been rejected by more recent authors (Salomon, op. cit., p. 228, n. 46; Brown, op. cit., p. 209; pace R. Cocke in exhib. cat., 2011, op. cit., pp. 56-57; and J. Marciari in exhib. cat., op. cit., 2018, pp. 40, 42).

Rather than with any of the frescoes at Maser, some of the studies on the Kasper sheet that are unrelated to the painting in Vienna (in particular those at upper left) seem to connect with a composition depicting the princess Europa abducted by Jupiter in the guise of a heifer, but no corresponding work by Veronese from this period in his career is known. Depending on where exactly one situates the Vienna painting in the 1550s, it is clear that the drawing should be dated accordingly. Of some importance in this discussion is the architectural vignette of a ruin upper right in the Kasper sheet, which, as Gallucci also noted (op. cit., p. 335), Veronese copied after Hieronymus Cock’s etched view of the Forum of Nerva published in 1551, providing a clear terminus post quem (T.A. Riggs, Hieronymus Cock. Printmaker and Publisher, Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1971, p. 262, no. 22, ill.). (Incidentally, Veronese used Cock’s print also as a model at Maser). In any case, the drawing is among the earliest surviving examples of Veronese’s study sheets in pen. More accomplished than one from around 1550 in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (inv. 1922-175; see R. Cocke, Veronese’s Drawings. A Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1984, no. 3, ill.; and D. Klemm, Italienische Zeichnungen, 1450-1800, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2009, I, no. 541, III, ill.), in its confidence, dynamism and richness of detail the Kasper drawing can be compared to two smaller sketches for Veronese’s paintings in the Venetian church of San Sebastiano from 1556 (Cocke, op. cit., 1984, nos. 5, 6, ill.; for the painting, see Pignatti and Pedrocco, op. cit., I, nos. 57, 58, ill.).

Fig. 1. Paolo Caliari, called Paolo Veronese, David anointed by Samuel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.