Flight into Egypt. Verso: Two Studies of Drapery and Studies of a Nude and Mother and Child

The present drawing bears an old attribution to Pomponio Amalteo in the lower right corner, which has been unanimously accepted by modern scholarship. The drawing is close, in reverse, to Amalteo’s fresco of around 1535 on the right wall of the nave in the Oratory of Santa Maria dei Battuti in San Vito al Tagliamento, Friuli (Cohen 1975, fig. 36), and could be a study for this fresco. Particularly striking are the similarities of the figure leading the ass, and the Virgin and Child in the drawing to the corresponding figures in the San Vito fresco.

The composition of the Morgan drawing was re-used for a much later altarpiece for the same subject in the chapel of the Montereale-Mantica family in the Cathedral at Pordenone (Cohen 1980, 124-25), which Amalteo was working on in around 1556. However, the poses of the figures have been altered and the composition significantly elaborated to the degree that if connected, the Morgan sheet must represent a very early stage in the painting’s development.

The verso of the sheet shows four studies, in black chalk, one of which – at lower center – is a rather uncertain study for the Virgin and Child on the recto. Both recto and verso show Amalteo working in a looser and more experimental mode than the other double-sided sheet by the artist in the Morgan Library collection (No. [1982.25]).