Bernardino Barbatelli, called Il Poccetti

With Flavia Ormond Fine Arts Ltd., London, and Adelson Galleries, New York, Italian Old Master Drawings 1500-1850, 1996, cat. 6, reproduced,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith College Museum of Art; Ithaca, New York, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Drawn to Excellence: Renaissance to Romantic Drawings from a Private Collection, 2012-2013, no. 24 (entry by Miles Chappell)

Stefania Vasetti, 'Due pale d'altare e alcuni disegni di Bernardino Poccetti', Paragone, 33-34 (607-609), 2000, p. 19, p. 26, note 43, reproduced figs. 14a, 14b

Although the authorship of this double-sided drawing – traditionally attributed, as the old inscription notes, to Lorenzino da Bologna (1530-1576) – was already identified prior to its purchase by Diane Nixon in 1996, it was Stefania Vasetti who recognised that the studies on both sides of the sheet are for The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, a large fresco in the main chapel of the Certosa at Pontignano, near Siena, painted by the Florentine master Bernadino Poccetti between 1596 and 1599. 

In her article dedicated to two altarpieces and some new drawings by Poccetti, published in Paragone in 2000 (see Literature), Vasetti pointed out that the two large soldiers seen almost from behind, on the recto¹ of the present drawing, relate to the soldiers seen to the left of the man ordering the nailing of Saint Peter to the cross in the fresco. The second soldier, more prominent in the drawing, is rather obscured by the first one in the painted version. Vasetti also notes that the two smaller sketches of Saints in niches, the first, seated, identifiable as Saint Stephen, and the second, kneeling and holding the palm of the martyrdom, recognisable as Saint Lawrence, are preliminary ideas for the frescoes on the painted pilasters which separate the main chapel from the nave. After executing the larger studies of the soldiers, Poccetti inverted the sheet before sketching these much smaller figures, in what had become the lower right corner.

A further study on the verso, surely drawn from life, shows a man walking to the right, his hands tied behind his back. This corresponds to the figure of Saint Peter being escorted to his martyrdom, seen in the fresco to the far right side of the middle ground. 

As Miles Chappell rightly pointed out in his 2013 catalogue entry (see Exhibited), this handsome double sided sheet shows how Poccetti had “developed a naturalistic, clear, monumental narrative style”. In its monumentality, his drawing style is still strongly reminiscent of some Florentine draftsman of the first half of 16th century, but this is tempered by an underlying sense of piety and realism, resulting from Poccetti’s contact with painters around Santi di Tito (1536-1603), who were practising a more naturalistic approach.

A very prolific draftsman, Poccetti began his artistic career frescoing the façades of Florentine palaces, thereby, according to his biographer Filippo Baldinucci (1625-1697), gaining the nickname of 'Bernardino delle Facciate' or 'Bernardino delle Grottesche'. Baldinucci also tells that he was taught by Michele di Ridolfo (1503-1577) before moving to Rome, where he lived in the house of the Chigi, now known as the Villa Farnesina.²

^1.When the drawing was first on the market, and in the subsequent literature, the side with the single study of Saint Paul with his hands bound was described as the recto, but we have preferred to return to the traditional interpretation, according to which the side with the larger studies and the inscription is considered the recto.

^2.Filippo Baldinucci, Delle Notizie de' Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in Qua.., ed. Manni, Florence 1770, vol. VIII, p. 180