Study for 'A Story from Boccaccio'

drawing height: 14 cm
drawing width: 12.5 cm
mount height: 48 cm
mount width: 31 cm

These pen drawings are studies for Watts’ massive oil painting, A Story from Boccaccio, which measures nearly thirty feet long. The episode from The Decameron tells the story of two spirits forced to act out a brutal hunt where the knight kills the woman who rejected him, every Friday. A young man who witnesses this ghostly event uses it to convince a woman who has been rejecting him to marry him. These tiny studies show the face of the knight with dramatic armour and facial hair, although in the finished painting the figure is cleanshaven. Watts painted this while he was in Italy for the first time, between 1843 and 1847. It shows his interest in Florentine Renaissance art. The helmet was inspired by a Michelangelo sculpture in Florence. Watts may have also drawn from Botticelli’s paintings of the same subject.

This work another called on Study for 'A Story from Boccaccio' (COMWG2006.31, 1846) are preparatory studies for Watts’s monumental painting A Story from Boccaccio, painted while he was in residence in Florence in 1846-7 (now at Tate Gallery). [1]. Watts took the subject from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a fourteenth-century Italian book of short stories on themes of love, sex, and marriage [2]. Watts’s selection of this narrative probably derived from the four paintings on the same theme by Sandro Botticelli and his workshop, held at Palazzo Pucci in Florence until 1866 (three canvases now at the Museo del Prado, with the fourth panel now restored to the Palazzo Pucci) [3]. This drawing reflects Watts’s interest in the art of the Italian Renaissance, especially Michelangelo, with the ornate parade helmet in the style all’antica, or ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘antique.’ This may have been drawn from Michelangelo’s sculpture of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici in the Medici Chapel, Florence, from which Watts also derived many of his reclining figures [4].

Watts’s patron in Florence, Lord Holland, wrote complaining of Watts’s intractability: ‘He will not paint portraits for gain,’ and ‘He is, however, terribly dilatory and indolent, and will not buckle to and study fresco painting as he ought’ [5]. A painting like A Story from Boccaccio, thirty feet long, overtly erotic, and essentially unsaleable, was absolutely not what he was supposed to be working on.  Watts was in Italy for the express purpose of studying fresco painting, in order to bring those skills back to England to decorate the Houses of Parliament and other public buildings; portraits were a good money maker and a way of Watts to provide a social and cultural service to the Hollands by painting their friends and peers. While Watts did do his research into fresco eventually, he also found time to engage with the wider visual field offered in Florence and other cultural hotspots of the peninsula. Among the works which had the most impact on him, across his career, were those of Michelangelo, and he wrote that ‘Not only does Michael Angelo give a character to his epoch, but he stands for Italy almost as Shakespeare does for England’ [6]. On the other hand, he did not particularly rate Michelangelo as a sculptor—this praise in Mary Watts’s Annals of an Artist’s Life is immediately followed by Mary recounting his criticism of the David. However, these remarks were recorded late in Watts’s life or after his death and may not reflect his views during his time in Italy. Lord Holland noted in 1845 ‘[Watts] will not be so unreasonable when the fit of glory and the visions of Michel Angelo shall subside a little’ [7]. 

Despite being barely larger than a 50p coins—for an over-life-size finished figure—these drawings provide a great deal of insight into Watts’s early conception for the vengeful knight. The Renaissance helmet does not only connect the drawing to Michelangelo and Florence, but also suggests an animalistic character for the knight, with the visor resembling a lion’s face. The pen studies show the knight with a dramatic, trailing moustache—the second sheet of studies with the knight on horseback shows a beard as well. The leonine elements of the helmet and the facial hair work together to reinforce the uncivilised nature of the hunting knight, particularly in contrast with the (unseen on this page) naked woman about to be torn apart by dogs and the elegant picnickers whose party is disturbed by the violence. In the finished painting, however, the knight is cleanshaven and his helmet more dragon-like than leonine.

The bearded model used here may also have been his inspiration for the figure of Caractacus in a partial cartoon and reduced copy now at the Victoria and Albert Museum [8].

Footnotes:

[1] Tate N01913

[2] Giovanni Boccaccio, trans. Charles Balguy, ed. Edward Dubois, The Decameron, or, Ten days Entertainment, of Boccaccio (London: R. Priestly, 1820) pp. 318-22.

[3] Katherine Gaja, G.F. Watts in Italy: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Florence: Leo Olschki Editore, 1995) pp. 72-3; Sandro Botticelli and workshop, Scenes from the Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, 1483, Museo del Prado, inv. P02838, P02839, P02840.

[4] See Chaos (COMWG.143, 1875-1882) and Prometheus (COMWG.28, 1904) for  examples from Watts's reclining giants.

[5] Giles Stephen Holland Fox-Strangways, Earl of Ilchester, Chronicles of Holland House, 1820-1900 (London: J. Murray, 1938) p. 324;  Katherine Gaja, G.F. Watts in Italy: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Florence: Leo Olschki Editore, 1995) p. 40.

[6] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912), p. 73.

[7] Letter of May 1845, quoted in Giles Stephen Holland Fox-Strangways, Earl of Ilchester, Chronicles of Holland House, 1820-1900 (London: J. Murray, 1938) p. 337.

[8] Victoria and Albert Museum, London, inv. CIRC.475-1920.  

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin