Study of a Seated Male Nude, after a Cast from a Modello for Michelangelo's Sculpture of Giuliano II de' Medici on his Tomb in the Church of S. Lorenzo (Florence)

Author: Albert Elen

This double-sided sheet belongs to a group of three originating from Tintoretto’s workshop stock that are related to the life-size marble sculpture by Michelangelo (1475-1564) of Giuliano II de’ Medici (1479-1516), duke of Nemours. The sculpture is placed in a niche above his monumental tomb in the New Sacristy of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence (1520-34). The tomb itself consists of two large marble sculptures of nude allegorical figures reclining on two volutes on either side of the sarcophagus’s lid, one female, the other male, personifications of night and day. Giuliano is represented seated, dressed in Roman armour, holding his army commander’s baton, with his head turned sharply to the right, looking away from the altar to the opposite recess with the sarcophagi of both his father, Lorenzo il Magnifico (1449-1492), and his brother and co-ruler, Giuliano I (1453-1478). On the opposite wall of the square hall and in a symmetrical arrangement, Michelangelo designed the marble funerary monument of Lorenzo II de’ Medici (1492-1519), duke of Urbino and nephew of Giuliano II, with his life-sized sculpture also seated in a niche above, looking to the left, and two similar reclining nude figures on his sarcophagus, one male, the other female, embodying twilight and dawn.

Michelangelo’s two funerary monuments became famous almost as soon as they were installed, drawing a lot of attention and admiration. Artists eagerly made copies after them in different media, in order to study Michelangelo’s virtuosity. In his Vita del Tintoretto (Venice, 1642, pages 6-7), his biographer Carlo Ridolfi (1594-1658) recounts how Tintoretto obtained from Florence some reduced models of the four allegorical sculptures of this monument, made in 1557 by Daniele da Volterra (1509-1566), which he studied by candlelight, making numerous drawings from different angles. Ridolfi doesn’t mention models after the sculptures of the two dukes, but this drawing and others bear witness that Tintoretto also owned one of Giuliano’s. These models were probably terracotta figures of reduced size. In our drawing the seated figure is represented in the nude, so either Tintoretto imagined the model unclothed or he instructed a life model to sit in the same position. Another, more plausible explanation is that Tintoretto used a plaster cast of a small-sized bozzetto which Michelangelo created as a model for the sculpture. This was proposed by Byam Shaw (1976), describing two other double-sided charcoal drawings of the same naked figure in Oxford, seen from the right, full-face.^[1] In our recto drawing the figure is seen from the left, with the averted head in almost lost profile.

On the reverse of our sheet is a similar drawing in the same position. Marciari points to ‘the typical flattening and overemphasizing of shadows’ in both drawings, ‘as if from copying a drawing, but by different hands doing it’.^[2] The lesser quality becomes apparent when confronted with the drawings in Oxford, which are more accurately executed with a better understanding of the musculature. This difference in quality is due to the fact that Tintoretto not only made studies after these sculptural models himself, but also involved his pupils - among them three of his own children - in his drawing sessions as part of their artistic training. They would not only follow the master’s instructions when observing and recording the sculptural models from different angles, but outside these sessions also copy drawings made earlier by him. Tintoretto and his pupils likewise made a number of detailed studies of the head, also from different viewpoints.^[3] Altogether some forty studies by Tintoretto and members of his workshop exist after replicas of Michelangelo’s sculptures of the two Medici tombs.^[4]