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

Jacopo Tintoretto (Jacopo Comin, Jacopo Robusti) (in circa 1578-1579)

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Specifications

Title	Study of a Male Nude, Seen from the Back, Seated on a Horse
Material and technique	Black chalk
Object type	Drawing > Two-dimensional object > Art object
Location	This object is in storage

Dimensions	Height 399 mm Width 264 mm
Artists	Draughtsman: Jacopo Tintoretto (Jacopo Comin, Jacopo Robusti)
Accession number	I 82 recto (PK)
Credits	Loan Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (former Koenigs collection), 1940
Department	Drawings & Prints
Acquisition date	1940
Creation date	in circa 1578-1579
Watermark	unclear, possibly small Crown (30 x 33 mm, upside down, right of center, vH, 8P, cropped folio). [see image]
Inscriptions	'tintoretto’ (below left, pen and brown ink), ‘7’ (verso, below left, pencil), '9' (verso, below right, pencil)
Collector	Collector / Franz Koenigs
Mark	F.W. Koenigs (L.1023a)
Provenance	Francesco II d'Adda, conte di Sale, Milan (-1641), album of drawings from c. 1630-40; - ; Franz W. Koenigs (1881-1941, L.1023a), Haarlem, acquired in 1926; D.G. van Beuningen (1877-1955), Rotterdam, acquired with the Koenigs Collection in 1940 and donated to Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Exhibitions	Amsterdam 1929, no. 296; Paris 1952, no. 12; Rotterdam 1952, no. 98; Venice 1957, no. 22; Paris/Rotterdam/Haarlem 1962, no. 113; Madrid 2018; Venice/Washington 2018
Internal exhibitions	Tekeningen uit eigen bezit, 1400-1800 (1952) Italiaanse tekeningen in Nederlands bezit (1962)
External exhibitions	Tintoretto 500 (2018)
Research	Show research Italian Drawings 1400-1600
Literature	Amsterdam 1929, no. 296; Paris 1952, no. 12; Tietze-Conrat 1944, no. 1661, pl. 109.3; Haverkamp Begemann 1952, no. 98; Venice 1957, no. 22; Haverkamp Begemann 1957, no. 44, ill.; Meijer 1959, pl. IIa; Paris/Rotterdam/Haarlem 1962, no. 113, pl. 83; Byam Shaw 1967, p. 46, no. 5; Rossi 1975, pp. 49, 53-54, fig. 188, XXX (verso, workshop); Van den Akker 1991, pp. 107, 109, fig. 169; Rearick 2001, p. 229 n. 252; Venice/Washington 2018, pp. 188-189, 263, fig. 175; Marciari 2018, pp. 137, 141 n. 54
Material	Black chalk > Chalk > Artist's material > Material > Material and technique
Object	Drawing > Two-dimensional object > Art object
Geographical origin	Italy > Southern Europe > Europe
Place of manufacture	Venice > Veneto region > Italy > Southern Europe > Europe

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Entry catalogue Italian Drawings 1400-1600

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.