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BERNARDINO BARBATELLI called IL POCCETTI
San Marino di Valdelsa (Florence)
1548 ~ 1612 Florence
Bernardino Poccetti studied under the Florentine painter, Michele Tosini, and his first employment was painting decorative grotteschi on the facades of Florentine palaces. From 1574 to 1578 he rented a studio and made the acquaintance of Buontalenti. The latter's influence on his work, especially in the use of perspective, was undoubtedly more useful than Tosini's instruction. In the early 1580s he worked on six lunette frescoes in the large cloister at Santa Maria Novella, Florence.1 In the decade from 1590 to 1600 he was asked to work in the Certose of Florence, Siena and Pisa. His reputation as a gifted and serious fresco painter was thus assured. His many preparatory drawings, in red or black chalk, are usually connected with the decoration of both churches and monastic buildings in Florence and its environs.
Our drawing is comparable to many of his red chalk drawings in the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence. These are all characterised by his soft touch of the chalk revealing subtle details of
faces or draperies. Our sheet depicts the Dominican friar, Saint Thomas Aquinas. who was appointed a Doctor of the Church in the sixteenth century. The identification is confirmed by the iconographical similarity of
our drawing to a fresco by Parri Spinelli in the Church of San Domenico, Arezzo, where Saint Thomas is depicted 'holding a model of a church in one hand, a sun, in the form of an infant's head, shedding its rays on
it, in the other'.2 The book can be explained because he was the author of Summa
Theologica which gives a rational explanation of the doctrines of the Roman Church.
It is clearly a preparatory drawing and it may well have been a primo pensiero, but later discarded, for the
figure of Saint Thomas painted in one of the small panels attached to the altarpiece of Saint Catherine of Siena in the nave of the Church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence. In the painting, as in our drawing, the
saint is standing, holds a small church in his left hand, and has his left leg slightly raised. However, in contrast to our drawing, his left leg is not covered with a large drapery fold from the cloak and his right
arm is not raised.3 Our drawing is stylistically of the same period as this altarpiece dated 1596.
1. Stefania Vasetti, Il Seicento Fiorentino, Biografie, exh. cat., Florence, 1986-87, pp. 149-152.
2. G. Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints in Tuscan Painting, Florence, 1952, cols. 980, 982, Fig. 1102.
3. Unfortunately, both this picture and the church itself are being restored at the moment of writing.
I am extremely grateful to Stefania Vasetti for so generously helping me with this entry.
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