Drawing of the Month #21
Sunday, 1 June 2025. Newsletter 21.
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)
Lectern with Books, 1521
Brush and black ink and white bodycolour, on gray-violet prepared paper, 19.9 × 27.8 cm, Albertina Museum, Vienna
Christof Metzger, curator for German and Austrian Art until 1760 at the Albertina, Vienna, has kindly chosen our 20th Drawing of the Month.
In the seventeenth century, the Eternal City offered a smorgasbord of ancient and modern architectural wonders. One can appreciate why so few artists sought out the early-medieval basilica of Sant’Agnese fuori le mura (Saint Agnes Outside the Walls), which, as its name suggests, was located in the outskirts of Rome. Claude Lorrain drew the site twice in the early-to-middle 1650s, around the same time as Pope Innocent X established Sant’Agnese fuori le mura as a titular church for a cardinal-priest, on the 5th of October, 1654.
In the Clark Art Institute’s drawing, Claude employed several, subtle pictorial strategies that, taken together, obscure any sense of temporal specificity and imbue the scene with an enigmatic air of grandeur. Upon first examination, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the church in the middle ground, captured in fine detail with pen and brown ink. We look past the haze of lightly-applied wash in the bottom corners, the diminutive traveler figures in the foreground, and the dark, blurry foliage hugging the right edge of the sheet as Claude’s crisp architectural linework pulls us in. We trace the contours of the Byzantine-style church up its sturdy masonry walls and along the sloping diagonals of its timber roofs. We get the sense that Claude viewed the church from below, as he shows the church’s campanile (belltower) surging up beyond the skyline. Perhaps also due to his vantage point — though more likely for dramatic effect — the artist increased the size of the distant Alban Hills. In the 1650s, the land around Sant’Agnese fuori le mura had been deforested and subdivided for pastures. Compared with Claude’s other drawing of the church (in the British Museum, 1895,0915.905) which shows a herd of goats grazing, we begin to see the fantasy at work in the Clark’s drawing. Claude has run back the clock, sending us back to an ancient age when the forest was lush, the foliage was dense, and the land was wild. Upon closer inspection, the travelers in the foreground appear to be wearing togas. In this drawing, time is not ruled by logic. The land is primordial, the figures are classicised, and the seventh-century structure is set adrift in the deep time of the Roman Campagna.
A View of Sant’ Agnese Fuori le Mura is one of sixteen drawings by Claude Lorrain that the Clark Art Institute purchased in 2007. Thirteen of the drawings — including the View of Sant’ Agnese — come from the famous “Wildenstein Album.” Following Claude’s death in Rome in 1682, his heirs organised his drawings into albums to sell. Queen Christina of Sweden, a passionate art enthusiast living in Rome at the time, purchased several of these albums, later passing some on to her friend, the Italian Prince Livio Odescalchi. From Odescalchi’s descendants, albums were dismembered and scattered throughout Europe, several making their way into royal collections in France and Poland, as well as the private collections of Pieter Teylers in Haarlem and William Cavendish, the Second Duke of Devonshire. In the late 1950s, an album of previously unknown drawings by Claude surfaced with London dealer Hans Calmann. After privately selling several individual sheets, Calmann sold the remaining 60-drawing album to Georges Wildenstein. A few years later, Wildenstein sold the album to Norton Simon, who unbound the sheets for an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1971. In the early 1980s, Simon sold half of the album to the London dealer Agnew’s, who sold thirteen of the finest drawings to the Manhattan real-estate entrepreneur and Old Masters collector Peter Jay Sharp. The Clark acquired its sixteen Claude drawings from Sharp’s heirs.
Claude Lorrain’s A View of Sant' Agnese Fuori le Mura is in the exhibition Pastoral on PapeR at the Clark, Williamstown, Massachusetts, through June 15.
Dürer’s Lectern with Books is in the exhibition Leonardo – Dürer. Renaissance Master Drawings on Colored Ground at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, to 9 June.
