Study of a Man Scratching his Ankle

Author: Klazina Botke

A young man, probably a model in the artist’s studio, has lifted his right leg and scratches his ankle with both hands. The figure is laid down with a brush and brown ink, and worked up with white highlights that have created convincing volume on the green prepared paper. The study was acquired as an anonymous Italian drawing supposedly made around 1700. Over the years, however, a number of art historians have tried to find a more specific attribution for the sheet. Thieme placed the drawing in Florence around 1600, possibly in Cigoli’s circle. Pouncey, who studied the sheet in person in 1962, attributed the work to Cigoli himself. This was later endorsed by Petrioli Tofani.^[1] The most recent suggestion came from Monbeig Goguel (2019), who, like Thieme, placed it in the artist’s circle.^[2]

What is certain is that the Rotterdam drawing has clear parallels with other studies attributed to Cigoli. We see a similar use of brush and ink, white highlights and prepared paper in a number of his works in Florence and Cambridge (Mass.), although the outlines of the shadows in those studies are rather harder and clearer than in ours.^[3] The Rotterdam drawing also has the same characteristic animation, brought about by the young man’s dynamic pose and the movement suggested by his raised leg. It is all reinforced by the white lines indicating the rapid movement of the foot. It was precisely these qualities in Cigoli’s work, said Baldinucci, that bore witness to ‘a certain liveliness and energy that I have never known, except in that of the great Michelangelo’. And he went on to elucidate: ‘I do not say that Cigoli’s manner of drawing is the same as Michelangelo’s, for that is very different, but that the spirit of both is such, particularly in the sketches, that one discovers at first glance a liveliness that springs from the whole and not the sum of the parts.’^[4] The drawing may have been made as a study for a supernumerary in a larger Bible scene. As Chappell states, such figures, which occur regularly in Cigoli’s compositions, contribute to the expressiveness of his painting. It made him one of the reformers of Florentine art.^[5]

In the lower left corner of the sheet there is a stamp with the initials P.H. It was long thought that this was the collector’s mark of Philippe Huart, but more recent research has revealed that this is not the case.^[6] The stamp appears on drawings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, on, among others, a number of sheets that are in the Louvre. This means that the as yet unidentified collector can in any event be placed in or after the nineteenth century.