This monumental study in coloured chalks and the related drawing in the following lot are two moving and highly significant contemporary records, drawn actual size, of heads of apostles in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (fig.1), the master’s celebrated mural in the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. Leonardo received the commission for this famous work in 1495, during his first sojourn at the Milan court of Ludovico il Moro, and it was completed in February 1498. The present drawings, which correspond closely to the heads of two of the apostles to the left of Christ, are part of a well-known series of eleven similar sheets scattered in museums and private collects ions, drawings which together passed over the centuries from the collects ion of the great English connoisseur Sir Thomas Lawrence to that of King William II of Holland, and then to the Grand Dukes of Saxe-Weimar, before being dispersed (see Provenance).1
A second group of six monumental and impressive coloured studies after heads in Leonardo’s Last Supper also survives, and is now preserved in the Strasbourg Museum.2 It is, however, surprising that no other contemporary copies of figures from the Last Supper are known, as the fresco became, more or less immediately after its execution, one of the most celebrated works of the Italian Renaissance, and no less rapidly began to deteriorate in condition and legibility, which must surely have prompted artists to seek to preserve as much as possible the memory of its original appearance.
The origins, function and authorship of all of these head studies has been much discussed. Historically, these large drawings executed in coloured chalks and pastel were linked to the reference, in Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della Pittura (1584), to the existence of pastel drawings by Leonardo, preparatory for the heads of Christ and the apostles in the Last Supper.3 The Weimar set was therefore believed not only to be drawn by Leonardo but to be fragments cut from the master's original cartoon. This theory was dismissed by the end of the nineteenth century, giving way to the idea that the drawings were copies by a member of the master’s close circle, and the names of Andrea Solario (1460-1524)4 and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (1466/67-1516) have been advanced by a number of scholars. A few have proposed that the ex-Weimar set, to which the present drawings belong, might be copies after the Strasbourg series, made in England in the 18th or early 19th century.5
Most recently, Carmen Bambach has discussed the drawings in her monumental, four-volume 2019 study, Leonardo da Vinci. Rediscovered (see Literature), where she dates both series to the early 16th century, and proposes that the ex-Weimar drawings are by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, though subsequently heavily reworked.6 In Bambach’s opinion, the Strasbourg set instead closely resemble the style of Giampietrino (1495-1521), a Leonardesque artist responsible for an important copy on canvas after The Last Supper (London, Royal Academy of Arts, previously on long-term exhibition at Magdalene College, Oxford).7 Bambach also highlights a key point regarding the innovative employment of colours and pastels by artists in the immediate circle of Leonardo like Boltraffio, and those of the second generation of Leonardesque masters, who were, she writes, ‘especially focused on the refinement of chalk-drawings techniques.’ Bambach continues: ‘Leonardo’s studies for paintings of the 1490s onwards attest variously to his innovative choices of media and pictorial techniques of rendering. His capacious willingness to experiment is prominently displayed in his design for the Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie. This is manifest in his use of chalks, both natural and fabricated (“pastellj,” in Leonardo’s own vocabulary), and papers prepared with or without color. His four notes on the making of “pastellj” generally date from the years of the Last Supper … The existence of copies in the new medium of pastel indicates that this moment of graphic discoveries by Leonardo was especially important for Lombard draft.mes n.’8
Due to the reworked condition of the present drawings, our reading of the original technique is, however, unavoidably somewhat compromised. Yet understanding, as far as we can, the nature of this technique and the exact materials and support used by the original artist is crucial to any attempt to comprehend the origins and likely authorship of these beautiful but enigmatic drawings. The area of the present drawing where the original style and materials are most clearly visible is to the left side, where we see almost in profile the head of St. Peter, executed solely in black chalk. It is in this head, drawn with a pale silvery-grey black chalk, where we see most clearly the original style of the first draughtsman.
In a detailed report examining and analysing the present sheets and their media, Marjorie Shelley, Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge of Works on Paper at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, identified two different chalk campaigns, the first of which, ‘confined to the rendering of the head of each saint,’ is close to Leonardo ‘in the methods and materials he would have transmitted to his followers.’9 The silvery tone of the original chalk used in this first campaign is distinctive, and in the head of Saint Peter the medium is applied with a certain structured freedom. Particularly noteworthy and idiosyncratic is the way that the right eye is constructed from an open V-shaped angle, intersected by two straight vertical lines to indicate the pupil, the whole structure made darker to the left where the eye is more in shadow. This sort of method might well have been found in an early manual for painters. The saint’s left eye, on the other hand, largely consists of the heavy black chalk strokes that are characteristic of the later retouching.
The overall conclusion that Marjorie Shelley reached in her unpublished report was the same for both drawings: the primary drawing ‘closely reflects Leonardo’s innovative pictorial practices of the 1490s that were quickly embraced by his followers, specifically the expressive potential of black chalk and dry color for naturalistic effects. The second campaign, the brightly coloured unmodulated pastel and dark chalk with its broad charcoal-like properties, however, differs greatly in the handling from early drawings of this type and appears to have been drawn in the late sixteenth century or after….’.
Still on the subject of the technical aspects of these drawings, the eminent paper historian Peter Bower separately undertook detailed and extensive evaluations of the primary support and the several backing papers, and his findings were published in Alessandro Ballarin’s Leonardo a Milano (see Literature). In 1999, Bower had studied three of these cartoons (St. Andrew, St. Bartholomew and St. Philip) in a London private collects ion, and subsequently, in 2006, he was able to examine another sheet from the set, the Head of St. Matthew (also in a private collects ion) in the paper conservation department at Tate Britain. Most importantly, on this second occasion, the primary support was removed from its backing sheets, and separated from all the edging strips and later repairs. Bower’s conclusion was that the examination of the primary support showed ‘nothing out of period, 1490s-1520s, for the paper,’ continuing ‘The wire gauges visible for both laid and chain lines are appropriate for the above dates. What can be seen of the original felt impression in the surface of the sheet is also typical of Italian papermaking at this date.’10 Yet despite this very clear stat.mes nt regarding the dating of the supports, and therefore presumably of the original drawings, Ballarin’s lengthy discussion of the Weimar group, in the same publication, concludes that the drawings were executed by an English hand, copying the Strasbourg series, in the late 18th or early 19th Century (see Literature).11 Following a recent viewing of the present drawings, Peter Bower has confirmed his previous dating of the primary support to the early 16th century, and also his view that the papers used for the backing sheets indicate that the drawings were repaired and remounted to look the way we see them today in England, around 1810.12
Other visual observations can shed interesting light on both the process of the creation of these two fascinating drawings and their subsequent history. Examination of the two drawings now offered for sale and of images of others in the same ex-Weimar group reveals clear signs of regularly spaced holes towards the edges of the sheets, indicating that the drawings were at some stage mounted onto wooden stretchers. The patterns of abrasions and other damages around the edges of the sheets, though partly due to silverfish or insect activity, is also consistent with the drawings’ having been previously mounted and presented in this way. From a relatively early date, it seems that these large, cartoon-like drawings were viewed as works that should, like paintings, be framed and hung on the wall. Yet there is also evidence, visible in raking light, of some indentation, most noticeably on the left contour of the face of the Saint John the Evangelist,13 and the discussion of whether these drawings were originally made purely as records of the fast-fading heads of these key figures in Leonardo’s Last Supper, or as studies for some future repetition of the great masterpiece will surely continue.
The complex and fascinating provenance of these two series has also been a matter of debate. In 1998 Cristina Geddo (see Literature) demonstrated that the long accepted early provenance of the Weimar set, until then believed to have belonged to the Arconati e Casnedi collects ion in Milan and the Sagredo family in Venice, was in fact confused with the provenance of the Strasbourg group. More recently, Linda Wolk-Simon has pointed out, in her informative article 'The ‘Cartones’ of Leonardo da Vinci’ (see Literature), that it had previously gone unnoticed that various nineteenth-century sources recounted the earlier whereabouts of the ex-Saxe-Weimar Heads, starting with William Buchanan (1777-1864). Buchanan was a pivotal figure in the dispatching of countless Continental collects ions to England during the Napoleonic turmoil, and in his Memoirs of Painting (1824) he mentions ‘a series of drawings for the celebrated work of the Last Supper, which were formerly in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, [and] are now in the possession of Sir Thomas Baring, Bart.’14 Sir Thomas Baring (1772-1848) and his father Sir Francis Baring (1740-1810) were clients of William Buchanan, though Wolk-Simon notes that it is unknown if he was involved in the transaction that brought these works to Britain.15 Buchanan was, though, extraordinarily well informed and well connected, and would surely have found the opportunity of getting hold of what were then considered to be Leonardo’s original cartoons for the Last Supper mouth-watering in the extreme. Next, the cartoons appear in the posthumous 1830 sale of part of the collects ion of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) (see Provenance): ‘Cartoons of the Heads in the Celebrated Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci, in Black Chalk and Crayons.’16 Furthermore, an anonymous print in the British Museum depicts the sitting room of Lawrence’s house in Russell Square, showing the set of the Heads of the Apostles framed and hanging on the right wall (fig. 2). This print, titled ‘The Private Sitting Room of Sir Tho.s Lawrence,’ and dating from 1830, the year of the Lawrence sale, gives a clear impression of the opulent elegance of the interior, filled with beautiful casts from the most important sculptures of Antiquity. The Heads of the Apostles were offered as ten lots (426-435) in the Lawrence sale, and Samuel Woodburn (1783-1853) bought seven of them (including the two offered here), as is confirmed by an account of Woodburn’s subsequent exhibition, published in the weekly Atheneum on 6 February 1836.17
These sources therefore demonstrate that the first English owner of the Saxe-Weimar group was Sir Thomas Baring, and, most interestingly, that these works could have originated from the Ambrosiana in Milan. This cannot, however, be proved as no old inventory of the Ambrosiana drawings collects ion exists, and although it is known that many works were looted from there by the French, there is no detailed listing of what they took.18 Other sources suggest that the cartoons could have been transported to Rome where they were seen by the painter Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807), who judged them ‘authentic’, before they were bought by two English artists and sent to London, where they were acquired by Thomas Baring around 1800.19 It is also possible, as suggested by Wolk-Simon and others scholars, that both sets of heads originated from the Arconati collects ion in Milan, one being a copy of the other. Count Galeazzo Arconati allowed copies to be made of the Leonardo works in the family’s possession before placing many of the originals by Leonardo in the Ambrosiana,‘perpetuamente a beneficio pubblico.’20
Both the technical evidence and the fascinating history of these impressive head studies seem to demonstrate that they originate from the immediate orbit of Leonardo, and although the extensive later reworking does make it difficult to determine with certainty the identity of the original draughtsman, a number of scholars, including David Alan Brown and recently Carmen Bambach, have proposed that the present studies and the others in the ex-Weimar group should be attributed to Leonardo’s close Milanese follower, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio.
These large coloured drawings are remarkable, tangible examples of the extraordinary legacy of Leonardo, both as precious contemporary records of The Last Supper, and as indicators of the experimental and innovative nature of the master's works, in which his exploration of chromatic effects and of combinations of media was so inspirational to his followers.
1. The locations of the other drawings in the group are as follows:
Chapel Hill, Ackland Museum of Art of the University of North Carolina (Heads of Judas and St. Peter, Heads of St. Thomas and St. James the Greater, respectively inv. nos. 77.53.1 and 77.53.2);
Melbourne, The National Gallery of Victoria (Head of Christ, Head of St. Thaddeus: respectively inv. nos 1972-4 and 1973-4);
London, Gabriele Pantucci collects ion ( Andrew, St. Bartholomew and St. Philip);
Monaco, Adriano Ribolzi collects ion (St. Matthew)
2. Strasbourg, Musée des Beaux Arts; acquired from Fairfax Murray by Wilhelm Bode for the Museum in 1892
3. G.P. Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della Pittura, scultura et architettura, Milan 1584, vol. III, p. 5
4. Bernard Berenson, for instance, believed them to be copies executed by Solario to be used for the replica of the Last Supper at Castellazzo, destroyed in 1943 (see Literature)
5. This despite the fact that John Udny bought the Strasbourg group in Venice, and sent them to Catherine II in St. Petersburg before 1799; see Geddo, cit., pp. 160-161 and Wolk-Simon, op. cit., p. 149
6. Moreover in vol. IV, p. 407, note 184, Bambach stresses again her attribution to Boltraffio, adding that the name of Boltraffio was first proposed by David Alan Brown in cataloguing the two sheets in the Ackland Art Museum (see Literature)
7. As Bambach acknowledges, the attribution of the Strasbourg drawings to Giampietrino had also previously been proposed by Cristina Geddo ( op. cit., 1998, pp. 162-163, 167)
8. Bambach, op. cit., vol. III, p. 533
9. This report is available on request for consultation.
10. Bower, op. cit., p. 891
11. Both Dehio (1896) and Möller (1952) had proposed that the Weimar set were later works, probably done in England, a theory not dismissed by Geddo in 1998 (see Literature)
12. Email dated 10th May 2022
13. These indentations are also discussed by Marjorie Shelley in her unpublished report
14. H. Brigstocke, William Buchanan and the Nineteenth-Century Art Trade, 100 Letters to his Agent in London and Italy, London 1982, pp. 460-61
15. Wolk-Simon, op. cit., p. 149, note 6
16. As Wolk-Simon noted, the visiting German connoisseur Gustav von Waagen (1794-1868), who first visited England in 1835, also recorded the Lawrence provenance for these drawings in his Works of Art and Artists in England (1838).
17. Wolk-Simon, op. cit., pp. 152-153, note 19
18. The booty surrendered following the French occupation in 1796 included not only the well known‘carton des ouvrages de Léonardo da Vinci’ (containing the Codex Atlanticus dispatched to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and twelve ‘piccoli manoscritti’ for the Institute de France); Wolk-Simon ( op. cit., pp. 152-154 and note 25) mentions an account by Lebrun of work removed from the Ambrosiana which included, in addition to Raphael’s cartoon for The School of Athens and eight cartoons by Tibaldi for the stained glass of Milan Cathedral, some 825 drawings, loose and in volumes.
19. Wolk-Simon, op. cit., p. 154 and note 27; A. Mussi, Discorso sulle arti del disegno, Pavia 1797, p. 33. This same information is found in Carlo Amoretti, Memorie storiche su la vita ...di Leonardo da Vinci, Milan 1834, pp. 59-60
20. Wolk-Simon, op. cit., p. 155