Study of a Male Nude, Seen from the Back, Seated on a Horse

Author: Albert Elen

This vibrant study of a male nude, seemingly sliding from a horse’s back or from a sphere, the left arm stretched out to the right and the toes of his left foot wide apart in a frantic attempt to restore his balance, was probably made from the artist's imagination. After so many years of relentless drawing after sculptural and life models, Jacopo Tintoretto, whose authorship has never been questioned, probably relied on his imagination and experience. As he occasionally used to do, he repeated the same figure on the reverse, but viewed from the other side.^[1]

Tietze/Tietze-Conrat’s assumption (1944) that Jacopo’s drawing was later used in reverse by his son Domenico (1560-1635) for The Vision of St Brigit, now in the Musei Capitolini in Rome, was confirmed by Rossi (1975), who considers it a late drawing from the 1580s. This late date was supported by Rearick (2001), who relates our drawing to stylistically similar studies for the bozzetto for the painting of Paradise in the Palazzo Ducale’s Sala del Maggior Consiglio in Venice, now in Madrid (circa 1588).^[2] Although it does not match any figure, Marciari (2018) considers our study so close in style to the studies for the ceiling painting Venice, Queen of the Seas in the Sala del Senato in the Palazzo Ducale (c.1588-92) that the artist probably made it in connection with that project, as part of a brainstorming session, but never used it.^[3]

On the other hand, Byam Shaw (1967), recently endorsed by Echols and Ilchman (2018), considers the figure to be a soldier about to fall from his horse and related to one of Jacopo’s paintings of battle scenes from the late 1570s. He points to a stylistically similar drawing of a man on horseback, attributed to the artist, now in New York.^[4] This connection proves more convincing than the others mentioned above. Indeed, if we turn our sheet a quarter clockwise the position of the figure changes into one seated upright, slightly leaning to the right while turning his upper body, similar to the New York sheet. That drawing is squared and preparatory for a soldier on horseback in the painting The Battle of the Taro, now in Munich, which was part of a historic cycle Tintoretto painted in 1578-79 in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua commissioned by duke Guglielmo I Gonzaga of Mantua (1538-87).^[5] In the New York drawing the rider is clothed, so it probably represents a next stage in the development of this particular figure. This man on horseback is also present in the squared bozzetto of the whole composition. In that drawing, now in Naples, the figure is followed by another rider, bending over to the right and also resembling the posture in our study, who is only partly visible at the far lower right in the painting.^[6] If this supposed functional relationship holds true, the Rotterdam drawing should be dated accordingly.