Seated Youth with a Stick

Author: Gert Jan van der Sman

This is one of the many figure studies Bernard Berenson attributed to Davide Ghirlandaio (1452-1525) in The Drawings of the Florentine Paintings (1938). In the second revised edition of his book (1970) he kept a more open mind with regard to this material: ‘I still believe that the available evidence points to Davide as the author of this series of drawings, but it is not strong enough to be convincing’.^[1] Experts like A.E. Popham, Philip Pouncey, Carlo Ragghianti and Gigetta Dalli Regoli distanced themselves from Berenson’s opinion and attributed some of the drawings to Filippino’s workshop.^[2] The drawing of the seated youth is closely allied to Filippino’s design idiom. That makes it possible to situate the Rotterdam drawing in his workshop.

Only a few late fifteenth-century Florentine figure studies are directly associated with paintings. By far the majority of drawings of this type were exercises on paper with which pupils and assistants could master the depiction of figures – standing and seated, nude and dressed. Filippino’s workshop trained many young apprentices, so it is impossible to link a specific name to the Rotterdam drawing.

The seated youth on the recto of the sheet holds a shepherd’s crook in his right hand. Fragments of sketches in silverpoint can be made out in the left margin, which indicates that the drawing was reduced on that side. It was quite usual for workshop assistants to draw two or even three figures in the left margin of horizontal sheets. Since the artists often left some space between the figures, many of these sheets could be cut up later. The bearded man on the verso of the sheet is shown in profile with his mouth slightly open. His right hand rests on a cursorily indicated stick. The swiftly applied white highlights on the heavy cloak vary in thickness and create a lively chiaroscuro effect.