Seven Male Figures

The artist of the present drawing copied individual figures from three of the paintings in Vittore Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula cycle of the mid-1490s ¹, comprising nine canvases (now in the Accademia, Venice) commissioned by the Scuola di Sant’ Orsola to commemorate the life of the confraternity’s patron saint. From left to right, the first four figures are taken from the Return of the Ambassadors to the King of England of ca. 1496 (Lauts 1962, no. 36); the next two from the Engaged Couple Being Greeted by the Pope in Rome of ca. 1492-94 (Lauts 1962, no. 18); the last figure is copied from the group of spectators in the extreme upper right of Saint Ursula and the Prince Taking Leave of their Parents of 1495 (Lauts 1962, no. 26). Although scholarship has continued to include the Morgan Library sheet in Carpaccio’s oeuvre, there can be no doubt that it is by a later artist and not by Carpaccio himself or even by an artist working under his tutelage.

Footnotes:

1. The first canvas, Arrival of Saint Ursula at Cologne, is dated 1490 and is Carpaccio’s earliest dated work. Other paintings in the cycle are dated 1491, 1493, and 1495 and later. The paintings passed to the Accademia in 1810.