Study of a Male Nude with a Boy

Author: Albert Elen

This drawing is accepted as autograph by most scholars except Rossi (2007), who attributes it to Jacopo Tintoretto’s son Domenico (1560-1635). Marciari considers it a working drawing by Jacopo, pointing to the pentimenti in the arms and the left leg.^[1] It belongs to a group of male nude studies with exaggerated musculature, which have been quickly sketched from the imagination.^[2] This so-called sacco di noce (bag of nuts) style is found mostly in Jacopo’s late drawings from the mid-1570s onwards.

According to Tietze/Tietze-Conrat (1944), the posture of the man corresponds to that in a workshop drawing, now in Florence. They think both may have been drawn after the same sculptural model.^[3] The most likely model, though, may have been a wax bozzetto for an Atlas sculpture probably by Michelangelo (1475-1564), which is now fragmentarily preserved in Rotterdam (fig.)^[4] and discussed in relation to another drawing there (see I 396).

The compiler of the Elenco (inventory) of the drawings in the D’Adda album (1926) described it as ‘no. 6: 'Studio per un Enea fuggente con Ascanio', although no painting of this subject is known in Tintoretto’s vast oeuvre.^[5] Rearick (2001), Loisel (2006) and Marciari (2018) consider the male figure preparatory to St Christopher standing on clouds at lower right centre in the bozzetto, now in Madrid, for the huge wall painting Paradise in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Palazzo Ducale, Venice.^[6] However, the position of the arms and the head differ markedly and the left leg of the painted figure is obscured by clouds. The same is true for the final figure - also holding a sphere - in the finished painting in Venice, executed by Domenico.^[7] It is possible that our drawing, together with another similar study in Rotterdam (I 406), was later reused as a starting point for the figure in the Paradise composition.

A more convincing direct link was proposed much earlier by Tietze/Tietze-Conrat (1944), and endorsed by Bjurström (1963): the main figure standing prominently on a wooden plank in The Naval Battle on the Lago di Garda, one of four nearly octagonal large ceiling paintings in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in Venice.^[8] They point to the corrections made in the pose of the man’s lower left leg, setting his legs wider apart, which corresponds with the painted figure. Tintoretto may have made use of an earlier drawing, which he adapted for the new purpose. The child and the stick were eliminated and the head turned in another direction. Our study is one of four surviving preparatory drawings for figures in this painting; one is now in London, being a reworked study for a soldier painted in mirror image, and two are in the Koenigs Collection (I 77, I 406).^[9] There is also a figure study for a soldier in the companion painting, The Defence of Brescia, in the Koenigs Collection (I 76).^[10]