Saint Peter

Saint Peter

Bernardo Strozzi

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

After training with Cesare Corte and about the time of his religious vocation, Strozzi entered the workshop of Pietro Sorri (1556-1622), the innovative Sienese painter sojourning in Genoa from 1956 to 1598, who led Strozzi's taste away from the somewhat artificial elegance of Cambiaso's late Mannerist style towards a greater naturalism. The Metropolitan Museum 'Saint Peter' likely dates later still, in the 1620s, when the taste for northern European art had found a receptive public in Genoa. Drawn with the incisively clear outlines and nearby calligraphic curved hatching of Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien, it depicts the apostle Peter as a pensive, bald, elderly peasant man with deeply furrowed brow, wild locks of hair, dense beard, and knobby-jointed fingers. In type and technique it relates to a bust-length Saint John the Evangelist (Louvre, Paris, inv. no. RF 38817; see Bernardo Strozzi 1995, no. 105). Probably part of a compendium, both of these figures exhibit traces of octagonal framing outlines on the bottom of the sheet and may thus be ricordi (records) of already executed compositions rather than preliminary studies. The drawing was part of the so-called Borghese-Sagredo album and is annotated along the lower border of the verso, "P.G. no. 38," as for "Prete Genovese" probably by Zaccaria Sagredo (for this aspect see also inv. no. 1997.223 and Piero Boccardo in Bernardo Strozzi 1995.).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.