Project for the Tomb of James III, the Old Pretender

Pietro Bracci · c. 1766

Medium

Pen and brown ink, and brush and brown wash, with white and blue gouache, over graphite, on cream laid paper, prepared with a brown wash ground

Original size

37.3 × 25 cm (14 11/16 × 9 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

Pietro Bracci's preparatory drawing for the tomb of James Francis Edward Stuart carries the quiet gravity of a monument that was never fully realised, rendered in warm browns and ghostly white highlights that give it an almost spectral presence. Bracci was the foremost funerary sculptor in mid-eighteenth-century Rome, responsible for some of the most ambitious memorial works in St Peter's Basilica, including the tomb of Maria Clementina Sobieska — James III's own wife. This sheet demonstrates how deeply he thought through the theatrical language of baroque commemoration: the layered washes build architectural volume, while touches of blue and white gouache pull light across the composition as surely as marble would catch it in a church interior. James III died in Rome in January 1766, having spent most of his life in exile as the Stuart claimant to the British throne, and this drawing was made in direct response to that death — a private commission from a court without a kingdom. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates Bracci's precise, intimate draughtsmanship into a medium with its own warmth and depth, preserving every layer of wash and every considered highlight while giving the image a physical presence it rarely enjoys behind museum glass.