Giorgio VASARI

This large and impressive sheet can be related to Giorgio Vasari’s altarpiece of The Stoning of Saint Stephen of c.1570-1571 in the church of Santo Stefano (also known as the Chiesa dei Cavalieri) in Pisa. Vasari had received the commission for the decoration of the church, dedicated to Saint Stephen and the home of the military Order of Santo Stefano, from the founder of the Order, Cosimo I de’Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1569. The Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino had earlier painted an altarpiece of The Nativity for the main altar of the church, but it was deemed to be too large for the position, blocking light from reaching the apse, and so was moved to a side altar. Vasari’s painting was to serve as a pendant to that of Bronzino, which it faced on the opposite side of the main altar. Although Vasari is known to have executed a preparatory drawing for the painting by January 1570, work on the actual panel was delayed by his commitments in Rome, and the painting was only completed and installed in the church in December 1571. The composition of the Pisa altarpiece is quite possibly inspired by Giulio Romano’s famous painting of The Stoning of Saint Stephen of c.1524 in the church of Santo Stefano in Genoa, a work praised by Vasari in his biography of Giulio Romano.

Datable to the end of 1569 or the beginning of 1570, the present sheet is one of only two preparatory drawings by Vasari that can be connected with the Pisa altarpiece. A pen and ink sketch in the collection of Anne Searle Bent in Chicago is much less finished than this drawing and must have preceded it. Both drawings, however, show differences from the final painting. While the bottom part of the altarpiece follows the lower half of the present sheet quite closely, Vasari significantly altered the upper half of the painted composition. As Härb has noted, ‘in the upper register [of the Pisa altarpiece], dominated by the Holy Trinity in both [the Chicago drawing and the present sheet], Vasari introduced a new solution; he moved the Holy Trinity to the left, adding on the right a view of the façade of the Chiesa dei Cavalieri, which he had designed. The differences between the two drawings and the painting may also be due to the different dates of execution; both, however, were probably made at an early stage in the design process. Since the execution of the painting began in earnest only about a year and a half after Vasari had made the first preparatory drawing, compositional changes were probably introduced subsequently.’

At around the same time that he was working on the Pisa altarpiece, Vasari painted another version of The Stoning of Saint Stephen, possibly with the assistance of Jacopo Zucchi, for a chapel in the Torre Pio of the Vatican; that altarpiece is today in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. Although Vasari had received the commission for the Vatican painting sometime after that for the altarpiece in Pisa, he actually completed the former work earlier, around May 1571. While the compositions of the two paintings are somewhat related, with a handful of figures repeated in each, the present sheet is much closer to the painting in Pisa.

The handwriting of the old inscription Giorgio Vasari at the bottom centre of this drawing is very similar to that found on several drawings in the Uffizi, and has been tentatively identified as that of the 17th century biographer, art historian and collector Filippo Baldinucci (1625-1696), who is best known for his biographies of Florentine artists published as Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua from 1681 onwards. Baldinucci was charged with assembling a collection of drawings for Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici, although he also acquired drawings for his own collection, eventually numbering over a thousand sheets kept in four albums. These volumes, which contained mainly drawings by Florentine artists - including at least six sheets by Giorgio Vasari - were acquired in 1806 by Dominique Vivant-Denon for the Musée Napoleon and are now in the Louvre.

This fine drawing by Vasari was later acquired by the 18th century English portrait painter, author and connoisseur Jonathan Richardson Senior (1667-1745), whose extensive collection of nearly five thousand drawings was comprised mainly of Italian works of the 16th and 17th centuries. Assembled over a period of about fifty years, Richardson’s collection was organized by school and date, and the drawings were further classified with a system of shelfmarks inscribed on the reverse of his mounts, as can be seen with this drawing. 

The present sheet also bears the previously unrecorded collector’s mark of David Hoffman H. Felix (1904-1988) of Philadelphia, and at his death passed to his widow, Claire S. Felix (1906-1993).

This drawing has been requested for the forthcoming exhibition Vasari e Roma, to be held at the Musei Capitolini in Rome from March to July 2026.