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Attributed to Raphael (Urbino 1483-Rome 1520)

The Miraculous Draft of Fishes c.1514

Pen and ink with wash and white heightening, over black and some red chalk underdrawing, on paper washed pale buff. Watermark of an anchor in a circle, surmounted by a 7-point star. | 20.0 x 33.9 cm (sheet of paper) | RCIN 912749

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  • The drawing is preparatory for Raphael’s tapestry cartoon of the Miraculous Draft of Fishes (RCIN 912944), one of the series of ten of the Acts of the Apostles, executed for Pope Leo X and transported to Flanders, where the tapestries were woven in the workshop of Pieter van Aelst. Seven of the cartoons survive in the Royal Collection, on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum since 1865; the ten original tapestries, intended to be hung in the Sistine Chapel on feast days, are housed in the Vatican Museums.

    The date of the commission is unknown, but probably came soon after Leo’s election in 1513; only two payments to Raphael are recorded for work on the project, on 15 June 1515 and 20 December 1516, the second apparently a final settlement. Seven of the tapestries had reached Rome by 26 December 1519, and the remainder by 1521. A statement of 1517 by a visitor to the weavers' workshop that sixteen tapestries were intended cannot be verified by other accounts nor by Raphael's preparatory drawings, though this number would have accorded better with the decoration of the Sistine. (For the full history of the tapestries see John Shearman's definitive study, Raphael’s Cartoons, 1972.)

    The present scene illustrates the calling of the fishermen Peter and Andrew on the lake of Galilee (Luke 5:1-10). It corresponds closely, so far as it goes, with the cartoon, though there the reclining oarsman is placed significantly closer to the two fishermen hauling in their net. The drawing lacks the elaboration of the landscape and figure groups on the far shore, the three cranes in the foreground and the haul of fish in the boats; these still-life elements in the cartoon were probably painted by Giovanni da Udine.

    The attribution of the drawing has been disputed. It is of the style and technique of a number of finished drawings from Raphael’s workshop that are usually attributed to Gianfrancesco Penni, Raphael's principal assistant before the entry into the studio of Giulio Romano. But in most of those drawings there a disparity between conception and execution: there are passages where the sketchiness loses structure, the heads are facile with a tendency to caricature, and the individual strokes lack complexity and differentiation – they are drawings made by Penni to work up Raphael’s designs. Here the execution is fully congruous with the invention: every mark has a purpose, and the media are combined with an intelligence that gives profound structure to the forms, justifying a tentative attribution to Raphael himself. Two pentimenti (changes of mind) are visible in the underdrawing, most significantly in the form of Christ's cloak, which falls steeply in the underdrawing but billows in a loop in the pen and wash, and also in the knot of drapery sketched from the thigh of the standing figure (infra-red examination of the cartoon shows that this detail was still being pondered in the underdrawing for the cartoon itself).

    An inscription on the verso, siculo, possibly refers to Jacopo Siculo (d.1544), an obscure Sicilian painter sometimes said to have worked in Raphael's studio and who was probably responsible for a compositionally unrelated fresco of the Miraculous Draft in the Cappella dell'Assunta of Spoleto cathedral. Early ascriptions to minor artists are generally more reliable than those to the star names, but the quality and style of the present drawing fit so well with those certainly by Raphael that it is not possible to give this early attribution (if that is what it is) any weight.

    The drawing was reproduced in a chiaroscuro woodcut, traditionally ascribed to Ugo da Carpi but now thought to be by Niccolo Vicentino (Bartsch XII, p.37, no. 13; RCIN 853019). Use of an overlay confirms that the size and contours are identical, and thus that the drawing (or a mechanically-derived sheet) served as the model for the print. Copies of the drawing are to be found at Windsor (990330), the Ashmolean (Parker 665a), and the Uffizi (1223-E). There are also many copies after the woodcut, and thus in reverse, such as those in Berlin (493) and the Louvre (Cordellier and Py, Raphaël..., 1992, no. 377), both attributed to the so-called "Calligraphic forger".

    Excepting a drawing for the cranes by Giovanni da Udine (whereabouts unknown), the only other sheet preparatory for the composition is in the Albertina, Vienna. On its verso is a large rapid sketch, now usually accepted as by Raphael, mostly agreeing with the present study but with the boats further apart in depth, and the second fisherman punting the boat rather than gazing towards Christ with hands held wide. On the recto of the Vienna sheet is a more finished variant of the composition - probably by Penni - with the boats now in the background at upper right and two groups of foreground figures on the shore of the lake, three standing men and two seated women, who pay no heed to each other or to the distant boats. It would be reasonable to dismiss the composition as a pastiche: but a possible explanation is offered by the intended position of the tapestry, immediately to the right of the altarpiece on the end wall of the Sistine Chapel. The adjacent tapestry on the right wall was to be Christ's Charge to Peter (for which an early scheme is recorded in RCIN 912751). Allowing for the final direction of each composition, the group of standing figures in the Albertina composition would have been continuous across the corner of the chapel, to merge with the group of apostles in the tapestry of Christ’s Charge.

    It is therefore possible that the recto of the Albertina sheet records a first design by Raphael for the Miraculous Draft, at a stage when he planned to run the pictorial space on from one tapestry to the next. This interplay of illusory and real space is difficult to realise successfully in tapestry, where the tonally-subdued nature of the medium, the vagaries of the weaving process, and the contingencies of subsequent hanging limit the artist's control over visual effects. The point at which Raphael changed the overall design of the tapestry cycle from an interlinked sequence to a series of self-contained images may be recorded in the rapid sketch on the verso of the Albertina sheet, when he took the essential motif and expanded it to the full scale of the tapestry.

    Text adapted from M. Clayton, Raphael and his Circle, 1999, no. 25
    Provenance

    Recorded in George III's 'Inventory A', c.1810, p. 49, Raffaello d'Urbino e Scuola, no. 2: 'The Miraculous draught of Fishes: the Composition Ditto. [ie. 'the same as the large Cartoon']. This Drawing was found in an Old Bureau at Kensington which contained part of the Collection of King Charles ye First, where also was preserved the Volume of Leonardo da Vinci'. But probably acquired by Charles II, c.1660-80, rather than Charles I.

  • Medium and techniques

    Pen and ink with wash and white heightening, over black and some red chalk underdrawing, on paper washed pale buff. Watermark of an anchor in a circle, surmounted by a 7-point star.

    Measurements

    20.0 x 33.9 cm (sheet of paper)

    Markings

    watermark: anchor in circle with seven-pointed star [verso]


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