Lot 2117 Dα

Pope Clemens XIV commissioned Anton Raphael Mengs with the decoration of the ceiling in the Stanza dei Papiri in the Vatican Library in Rome in 1771. The focus of this decorative scheme, completed by Mengs in the following two years, was a fresco with an allegory of the Museum Clementium. The two longer sides of the ceiling were occupied by groups of putti with a pelican and an ibis and the shorter sides with depictions of Moses and Saint Peter as representations of the beginning and the final goal of Christian written culture. The present work is a bozzetto by Mengs for the motif of Peter. It could be identical with the bozzetto painted on canvas in “chiaroscuro” mentioned in the artist's estate records that were made in Rome following his death in 1779, just a few years after the completion of the frescos (cf. the copy of the inventory in: Roettgen 1990, p. 564, no. 64).

Professor Dr. Steffi Roettgen, who has examined the painting first hand, writes in her expertise, “Monochrome bozzetti such as this one appear relatively frequently within Mengs' oeuvre. He used them especially in compositions with large numbers of figures in order to develop the “chiaroscuro” or balance of light and shadow, in the finished work. These oil sketches are characterised by their pastose and sketchy style and their disregard for finely worked details. This sketch-like monochrome oil study of Saint Peter is an example of this design stage. The work eschews architectural details in order to concentrate fully on the figural composition, which already corresponds to that used in the finished work. The next stage was the completion of a coloured modello (Roettgen 1999, cat. 309) and after that, a card model drawn to scale (Roettgen 1999, cat. 307 VZ 5) that could be used to transfer the design onto the vault. Since no other preparatory drawings for the section of vault with the depiction of Saint Peter have survived, this grisaille bozzetto represents a especially important document of the artist's working process.”