(Urbino 1483–1520 Rome)
Recto: Study for the Battle of the Milvian Bridge: a rider on horseback and horse’s head and eye,
bears inscription on the mount: par RAPHAEL,
red chalk and pen on paper, 22 x 24 cm, framed

Polidoro da Caravaggio
(Caravaggio circa 1499 - circa 1543 Messina)
Verso: Studies for the Donation of Constantine (?): a Solomonic column and seated male figures,
red chalk and black chalk on paper, 22 x 24 cm, framed

Provenance:
probably private collection, France, until the 1920s or 1930s;
Iohan Quirijn van Regteren Altena (1899–1980), Amsterdam;
and thence by descent;
sale, Christie’s, Paris, Dessins anciens et du XIXe siècle incluant la Collection I. Q. van Regteren Altena. III. Ecoles Français et Italiens, 25 March 2015, lot 7 (as Italian School, 16th Century);
where acquired by the present owner

Exhibited:
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Italiaanse tekeningen uit een Amsterdamse collectie, 24 April – 28 June 1970, no. 16 (as Polidoro da Caravaggio)

Literature:
I. Q. van Regteren Altena, Rubens as a Draughtsman, in: The Burlington Magazine, vol. 76, no. 447, June 1940, p. 199, pl. II, A and B (as P. P. Rubens);
s. a., Italiaanse tekeningen uit een Amsterdamse collectie, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam 1970, p. 13, no. 16, fig. 9 (as Polidoro da Caravaggio);
P. Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio. L’opera completa, Naples 2001, p. 181, figs. 204, 205, p. 467, no. D 4 (as Polidoro da Caravaggio)

We are grateful to Professor Paul Joannides for endorsing the attributions of the drawings on both sides of the present sheet, and for his help in cataloguing this lot.

History of the drawing

The present sheet was probably acquired in the late 1920s or early 1930s, no doubt from a (unidentified) French collection, by the scholar and collector, Iohan Quirijn van Regteren Altena. In 1940, in the Burlington Magazine, he published the drawings on both sides of the sheet as Peter Paul Rubens, illustrating them in high-contrast black and white photographs which falsified their forms and gave them a misleading sharpness. Although understandable as a response to the quality of the drawings, and their inherent energy, this attribution was evidently incorrect and was ignored by scholars of Rubens. In 1971, in the unsigned catalogue of an exhibition devoted to his collection, van Regteren Altena included the sheet, illustrating (poorly) only the recto, and attributing it to Polidoro da Caravaggio following and acknowledging the judgement of three eminent scholars, John Gere, Konrad Oberhuber and John Shearman, but not specifying whether their views were based on photographs, or on study of the original.

In 2001, Pierluigi Leone de Castris included both recto and verso among Polidoro da Caravaggio’s earliest known drawings in his outstanding monograph on the artist, but he reproduced both sides of the sheet from the images in the Burlington and may not have been able to study it in the original (see literature). When this work was offered for sale in the auction of the van Regteren Altena collection in 2015, the attribution to Polidoro, although mentioned, was effectively dismissed, and the sheet was catalogued generically – and inadequately – as Italian School, 16th Century. It was acquired at that sale by the present owner who gradually became convinced that, while the verso was by Polidoro, the recto was attributable to Raphael. The sheet was brought to the attention of Professor Paul Joannides who, after studying it at length, accepted the attribution of the drawings in red chalk on the recto to Raphael and prepared a report on the sheet which he has allowed us to use.

The Vatican Stanze

Starting in 1508, Raphael worked in the Vatican for some twelve years, until his sudden death in April 1520. His central activity was a series of frescoes for the Stanze Vaticane, four large rooms, now part of the Vatican Museums, that formed the extensive apartment created for Pope Julius II, occupied by him until his death in 1513 and subsequently by his successor Leo X, who continued their decoration. The last of these rooms, the Sala di Costantino, begun in the second half of 1519, was designed to host papal receptions and official ceremonies.

Between 1508 and 1514, Raphael concentrated on the decoration of the Stanza della Segnatura and the Stanza d’Eliodoro, both rooms with arched walls, two of them interrupted by windows. From 1514 to 1517 he worked, with much help – and hindrance – from assistants, on the third room, the Stanza dell’Incendio, also with arched walls and irregular interruptions which limited his scope. The execution of the Incendio overlapped with three other major schemes directed by Raphael: the decoration of the Sala dei Palafrenieri and the Loggia in fresco, as well as the cartoons in water-colour for the tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel.

The fresco schemes were executed entirely by Raphael’s assistants, but the tapestry cartoons are largely autograph. The figuration of the Palafrenieri consisted of simulated marble statues of the Apostles, a speciality of Raphael’s, and the tapestry cartoons, grand narratives in a stately neo-Masaccesque manner, shared with the Palafrenieri a severe and stately clarity. But they allowed relatively little opportunity for variety of action and emotion and less for Romanising epic. The Loggia, on the other hand, invited Raphael to develop his skills as a storyteller in 52 narrative frescoes of widely ranging subjects, but only on a frustratingly small scale.

Raphael must have anticipated eagerly working on the very large, rectangular, and relatively regular Sala di Costantino, with its then flat ceiling (for which he probably made designs) and three uninterrupted walls.

The project offered him the opportunity to execute an historical and dramatic cycle in which he could develop and extend his previous achievements. He would be able to compete in drama and human interest with the works of the poets and historians he had portrayed in the Parnassus and in archaeological accuracy with the Triumph of Caesar by Mantegna, one of Raphael’s heroes and a focus of his emulation.

Perhaps more importantly, in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the largest and most dramatic of the four frescoes, and one that owes a profound debt to antique battle reliefs, he would be able to challenge in energy and physical invention the aborted battle scenes planned by his one-time mentor, Leonardo, and his older contemporary and rival, Michelangelo, for the Sala del Gran Consiglio in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Projects, whose fame, Vasari informs us, had first drawn Raphael to Tuscany, and which continued to inspire him. Even during his Florentine sojourn, the period of his ‘dear Madonnas’, he made drawings of battles, known in originals or copies, and this fascination continued in Rome (see for example, the battle drawings of circa 1507 in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

The battles that Leonardo and Michelangelo designed were immensely ambitious, and immensely influential, but however much their designs transcended their subjects, those subjects were episodes specific to the history of Florence and Tuscany: Cascina, a skirmish with Pisa of 1364, Anghiari, more important historically, the military curtailment of Milanese expansionism in 1440. Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge was a combat of an entirely different order, a world-historical event – signifying, in simplified terms, the overthrow of paganism and the establishment under Divine guidance and in the caput mundi of a Christian Empire. On stage were not little-known mercenary commanders, but the man who became the first Christian Emperor and his Pagan adversary: representatives, as it were, of heaven and hell. There could hardly have been a more momentous subject and the battle that Raphael designed, but did not live to execute, was one of his greatest and most influential achievements as, among many others, Rubens, Pietro da Cortona, Charles Le Brun and Eugène Delacroix could testify.

The Sala di Costantino

For the Sala di Costantino Raphael planned four frescoes of episodes from Constantine’s life. In order of events, the episodes are: The Allocution (or Constantine’s Vision of the Cross) on the East wall, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on the South wall, the Baptism of Constantine on the West wall and Constantine’s (fictional) Donation of Temporal Power to the Papacy, on the North wall. The largest and most ambitious fresco in the room was and is the immensely complex multi-figure composition of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. In its final painted form, it measures some 7 meters high by 18 meters wide and includes between 50 and 60 men and over a dozen horses.

Such an ambitious scheme would have required much initial research on the armour and accoutrements of Constantine’s period, to satisfy Raphael’s archaeological bent, and dozens of preparatory compositional and figural drawings, of which only a handful are known. Not all these studies would have been made by Raphael himself; some of the surviving figure-drawings are by his closest assistant and collaborator Giulio Romano, while the modelli for the Battle and the Allocution were made by Raphael’s more pedestrian collaborator, Gianfrancesco Penni. However, Raphael knew that his work in the preceding room, the Stanza dell’Incendio, had been severely criticised and, with his reputation under attack from his rivals Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo, he would have made every effort to answer his critics. It can be taken for granted that he was fully engaged in the planning of the Sala and would have supervised closely (and perhaps participated in) the execution of the histories.

Raphael died in April 1520, probably shortly after Giulio had painted a pair of allegorical figures at the ends of the South and East walls, but before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge was begun. It is the only fresco of the four in which Raphael’s ideas were followed without alteration.

After his death, work in the Sala di Costantino was continued, principally by Giulio Romano, who was keen to stamp his own personality on the cycle. In December 1521, after the completion of the Allocution, in which Giulio took the opportunity to introduce numerous ideas of his own, work was interrupted by the death of Leo X. It was re-started only late in 1523, after Leo’s cousin, Cardinal Giulio, became Pope Clement VII and it was in this second phase that the Baptism and Donation were painted. The main scenes were completed by mid-1524 after which Giulio departed for Mantua but the dado was probably not finished until the end of that year or early in 1525.

Gianfrancesco Penni’s large modello for the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, in which the fresco’s overall scheme and its proliferation of interrelated details is laid out, is conserved in the Louvre in Paris. It was certainly made in Raphael’s lifetime and followed his ideas closely and loyally: it is likely to have been presented to the Pope for his approval. A fragment of the final cartoon, which probably just predates Raphael’s death, is conserved in the Ambrosiana Library, Milan: drawn by Giulio Romano. It differs minimally from the relevant sections of the modello and the completed fresco.

Three nude studies survive for individual figures within the fresco, all executed in black chalk. They seem to have been made after the modello, to refine elements of pose, but prior to the cartoon. These drawings, all of which represent Maxentius’ soldiers, are, from left to right of the Battle, a study for an heroic infantryman, by Raphael, in the Louvre; a falling cavalryman by Giulio Romano, preparatory for a figure who is armoured in the fresco, now in the Devonshire Collection in Chatsworth; and, lastly, a study by Raphael of two soldiers forced into the Tiber attempting to climb into a boat, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. These three studies focus respectively on courageous resistance to Constantine’s advance, on headlong defeat, and on a doomed attempt at survival; in a sense – if only adventitiously – they encapsulate the progress of the battle. But they were no doubt accompanied by many others, now lost, for other specific areas of the fresco. Black chalk clarified– and to some extent simplified – the inherently sculptural mode of the Battle and helped measure its chiaroscuro.

The red chalk drawing on the recto of the present sheet, depicting a fallen horse and its trapped rider, vainly attempting to defend himself from the coup de grace about to be administered by an infantryman, can now be added to the census of preparatory studies; but it is not part of the black chalk group, and its character is different. It is not an evenly focused study of an isolated figure – the horse is more expressive and precisely characterised than its rider – but a developed contextual sketch, with varied emphases. It is drawn in red chalk because that allows both selective stumping and continuous modelling and, in short, a greater elasticity of emphasis than black, and much subtler continuities than pen.

The modelling is widely varied and effectively localised: the relief of the horse’s head and its terrified eyes, for example are telling, while the rider’s expression is no more than adumbrated. Raphael may also have employed red chalk, inherently lighter in tone than black, for the fallen cavalryman, because for that area of the fresco he planned a slightly higher key, to spotlight, as it were, a group of particular significance. Raphael, as we know from studies for the Psyche Loggia and the Stanza dell’Incendio, had by this phase of his career come to prefer red chalk for sketching or intermediary drawings and the medium gradually assumed some of the functions previously served by pen. Indeed, in the present drawing, certain elements, notably the swiftly outlined rider, retain a trace of Raphael’s later pen technique, seen in such drawings as the Abduction of Helen of about 1517 in the Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth (inv. no. 903); the use of small circles to indicate eyes is also common to both drawings.

Previous writers seem to have assumed, without questioning the matter, the recto group to be a copy of the relevant section of Raphael’s composition and have ignored the subsidiary sketches. But quite apart from its fresh, vital and varied handling, exceedingly rare in copies, which conveys width and volume much more successfully than the modello, the group differs in significant ways both from Penni’s modello, and the fresco. It departs from the modello in that the rider is differently clad and his right hand holds a sword at a different angle, and the horse’s left foreleg, which is overlapped by another form in the modello, is not overlapped here.

The angle of the head of Constantine’s charger in the subsidiary sketch is lower and the study of the horse’s eye is detailed and assertive. Indeed, the chain of equine gazes that is so expressive a feature of the fresco, seems to be established in this drawing. Such attention to eyes is characteristic of Raphael’s scenes of drama and is found in some of his preparatory drawings, such as his study of circa 1518 for a kneeling maidservant for the Psyche Loggia, now in the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (inv. no. D5154), although rarely as isolated as here.

On the other hand, it is not hard to see why it has been thought to follow the fresco, for it does come close to what was painted. Thus, the three faint lines at upper right indicate the bridge and establish the position within the scheme of the fallen cavalryman. But context is suggested, not described as it would be in a copy. There are numerous differences from the painted group, mostly slight, but significant. The costume worn by the rider in the fresco varies in relation to the present study: in the painted depiction, the far arm is naked and the near arm armoured, whereas in this drawing both arms seem to be clad in a light garment, although it is hard to make out. The spearhead embedded in the dying horse’s chest, so dramatic a feature of the fresco, is absent from this drawing. The contours of the horse’s chest are varied in the fresco and its head and mane are also differently shaped. There is no indication in the drawing of the soldier with raised dagger who, in the fresco, forces down the rider’s head to despatch him and which one would have expected to be included in a copy.

More formally, when the fresco, which was not painted by the master, but by Giulio Romano and others after his death, is compared with the present drawing, all the intervals and angles have been modified and the contours stiffened and simplified. There is also a positional difference: in the fresco the dying horse, its blood ebbing, has sunken to the ground, whereas in the present study the horse is set a rising angle. This is not the product of a trimming of the page, for the paper’s chain-lines veer by only a couple of degrees from the vertical established by the edges. The angle at which the drawing is set on the page was therefore intentional, but it was then revised for the final arrangement. At the lower edge is an angled line, an ironed-out fold, which descends from about 25mm on the left edge of the page to about 12mm where it intersects with the torn corner at the lower right. If this fold is taken as the horizontal base line, then the horse lies at an angle roughly equivalent to its final position.

Relatively few drawings by Raphael survive from his last two or three years, but, fortunately, among them is one that compares extraordinarily closely with the present work: this is the red-chalk sketch of 1516–17 in the Albertina Vienna, for the two riders at the right-hand side of Raphael’s Spasimo altarpiece, now in the Prado in Madrid (inv. no. P000298). When the two drawings are placed side by side the balance of hatching and stumping is virtually identical, as is the characterisation of the right-hand horse, the shape of the eyes and the form of its head; the bridles too are similar. But while the Albertina drawing is in perfect condition, aside from a slight trimming at the top, the present drawing has suffered somewhat from fading and rubbing, so that the structure of shadow on the near side, and the protrusion of the rider’s leg are not now immediately apparent; they are actually clearer in the black and white photo of 1940 from which it can be seen that this area was executed rapidly, with the chalk handled very freely. Raphael set himself the task of establishing where one form ends, and another begins in an area of shadow: to judge exactly what he was doing demanded skill of a very high order and he achieved it without overlaps.

The rider depicted in the present drawing, whose horse has fallen under him, appears, among Constantine’s adversaries, to be second in importance only to the pagan emperor. Constantine’s gaze is fixed upon the drowning Maxentius who, clinging vainly to the neck of his foundering horse, stares in impotent malevolence at his conqueror. But it is towards the fallen cavalryman that Constantine’s lieutenant points. The officer about to be despatched must be a significant historical actor for whom Raphael strove to devise an individual fate within the painting’s panorama of defeat. His identity remains for the moment a mystery and an appropriate personage is not to be found in the accounts of the battle by the historian Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History or his Life of Constantine; but Raphael no doubt consulted historians and theologians at the Papal court to learn of details that Eusebius failed to supply.

Drawings by other artists are occasionally seen on the versos of sheets by Raphael. A salient example is an autograph drawing by Raphael of circa 1503 which carries on its verso a compositional sketch of circa 1530 by Perino del Vaga (see P. Joannides, Raphael and His Age, Drawings from the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, exhibition catalogue, Cleveland-Lille 2002/2003, no. 20, pp. 98–101). But such a time-lapse is extreme. In most instances verso drawings – or, very occasionally, recto additions – by other hands were made soon after, or contemporaneously with, Raphael’s drawings. Thus, several sheets by Raphael contain drawings by Giulio Romano, notably at moments when they were working side-by-side. In the present case Polidoro’s drawings probably postdate Raphael’s by no more than a year or two, and perhaps less; it seems likely that after the completion of work in the Loggia in 1518, Polidoro was recruited to work in the Sala di Costantino, where he would have had ready access to working drawings and cartoons by Raphael and his collaborators.

Surprisingly, Polidoro’s drawings on this sheet, which are entirely characteristic of his style, have received no attention; but, when they are examined without preconceptions, they prove extremely revealing. To the left of Raphael’s group on the recto, inverted and overlapping it slightly, is a standing figure seen from the rear, quickly sketched from life. Polidoro’s verso sketches comprise what seems to be a sprawling man, seen from the front, swivelling to look at something, near whom is a slight architectural sketch, apparently the capital of a pier. Both are lightly sketched in black chalk. In red chalk, however, Polidoro drew another, more strongly defined, reclining figure who also seems to be observing an event. The final, and most significantly indicative feature is the Solomonic column, also in red chalk, which, like the reclining man, is lit from the right. It is the column which links together and explains the actions of the figures, all of whom are posed, as it were, as spectators. In the Sala di Costantino, only the Donation of Constantine – lit from the right – contains Solomonic columns, a famous feature of Old Saint Peter’s, where the Donation of Constantine was imagined to have taken place and which are seen in the fresco’s background. The foreground and middle ground of the Donation, of course, are occupied by spectators in varied poses.

It seems that in his drawings on this sheet, Polidoro was either interpreting sketches by Giulio and/or Penni made in preparation for this fresco or, perhaps more likely, was putting forward ideas of his own for the Donation, for it was at this time, in the period immediately following Raphael’s death, that Polidoro was emerging as the strongest and grandest composer among all the Master’s followers.

Raffael Booklet

Rediscovered Raphael Drawing