Standing Woman Looking to Left Background

Saint Hyacinth, a thirteenth-century Polish Dominican missionary, was canonized in 1594, and shortly thereafter Francesco Vanni received two important commissions for paintings representing miracles of this saint for Dominican churches in Siena (see also inv. 1975.131.55). Here, this keenly observed preliminary study after the live model served for the design of a female onlooker on the right foreground of Vanni's painting of ‘Saint Hyacinth Resurrecting a Drowned Boy’, circa 1595-96, which was intended for the Bargagli Chapel at the church of Santo Spirito in Siena. In the painting the woman looks directly down at the miracle, which occurs in the immediate foreground. Here, the artist unified the luminous effects he obtained with the dry red chalk by reworking areas of intermediate shadow with a transparent wash of red chalk powder diluted in water.

A number of other preparatory drawings for this project survive: A preliminary sketch in oil paint on paper in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (Inv. 2015), which differs in many ways from the finished painting, accounts for the backward glance of the figure in our drawing. In the Louvre composition sketch, the miracle takes place on a second plane of the pictorial space, thus the spectator in the foreground looks inward. A number of preparatory drawings for this painting have survived (see Riedl 1976, pp. 36-37). The leading Sienese painters of the second half of the sixteenth century, working chiefly for ecclesiastical patrons during the strict climate of the Counter-Reformation, Francesco Vanni and his younger stepbrother Ventura Salimbeni infused their paintings with a new naturalism through attentive studies of the live model such as this one.