XVI Century, Sacrifice of Isaac

XVI Century
Isaac's sacrifice
Sanguine on paper, 76 x 56 cm
With frame 93 x 73 cm

In Genesis (22, 1-13) it is told how God tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son Isaac. The patriarch obeyed and only when he was about to cut the boy's throat did an angel descend to stop his gesture and communicate God's satisfaction to him. The scene, not uncommon in Florentine art, symbolized a prefiguration of God's willingness to sacrifice his son Christ for the good of humanity. Andrea del Sarto solved the task with monumental figures of the protagonists, elegantly composed to generate a serpentine movement that unravels along a diagonal.

Isaac is half naked and with one knee and one foot resting on the wooden altar; his wrists are tied on his back and he is bent over with fear as he turns his painful face downwards. Abraham towers titanic behind him, with the dagger firmly in his left hand, already stretched out to deliver the blow, and his right hand holding the child still, while his head turns backwards to listen to the message of the little angel who has just glided from heaven to stop the gesture. The patriarch's robe, moved by the wind, gives his figure an almost heroic prominence and a strong expressive charge. The background is composed of a rarefied landscape in which a tree can be distinguished, on the left the sheep that Abraham had brought to the sacrifice so as not to arouse suspicion, on the right the servant who waits unaware of what is happening.

Michelangelo's debts are evident, especially in the figure of Abraham, mindful both of the Prophets on the vault of the Sistine Chapel and of the Doni Tondo; from the latter derives the serpentine rotation and the presence of the nude in the background. But the particular dynamic accent also recalls the Laocoön Group, discovered in Rome in 1506 and which immediately became very popular, all seasoned with the particular "Sartesque shade", derived from the Vincian one but brighter in the chromatic range and sandy consistency, and by a well-balanced arrangement of the figures, derived from reflection on Raphael's Florentine works.

The work is inspired by the canvas depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac, oil on panel (213×159 cm) by Andrea del Sarto, datable to around 1527-1529 and preserved in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden. There is also a less finished version, usually considered as a first draft, at the Cleveland Museum of Art (178×138 cm) and a third version, on a smaller scale, at the Prado Museum (98×69 cm), dating back to 1527- Around 1530. The work was commissioned in 1527 by Giovanni Battista Della Palla as a gift to the French king Francis I, who about ten years earlier had hosted the artist in Fontainebleau without however managing to keep him at his court. In the stormy political events of the time, Della Palla ended up being imprisoned in 1530, before the work was sent and shortly before the artist died, after having made three versions, as Vasari recalls, at different stages of finishing and for different sizes. The one in Cleveland was probably an unfinished test, abandoned early for a larger work with some variations. The one in Dresden, the largest and best finished, was perhaps the one intended for the French king, but the painting was requisitioned by Alfonso d'Avalos, marquis of Vasto, to whom the monogram on the rock in the foreground refers, added in a second moment. Others, however, think that the Madrid version is the one owned by the Marquis; the latter is the smallest and is identical to the Dresden version, so it is assumed to be slightly later. Of the Madrid version we know that it was purchased by Charles IV of Spain and is documented for the first time in the Casita del Príncipe in the Escorial monastery in 1779, after passing to the palace of Aranjuez in 1814, it finally joined the Prado.

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