Study of a Standing Male Nude after a Bozzetto by Michelangelo

Author: Albert Elen

When this sheet was removed from its old backing paper in the 1990s, a very similar drawing on the verso was revealed. It is the same muscular nude male figure as on the recto, with identical pose in frontal view, but much stronger in execution, in Tintoretto’s typical black-and-white chiaroscuro style. This makes one wonder why Giuseppe Vallardi (1784-1861), whose mark is the oldest on this side of the sheet, or a collector before him preferred the weaker version. Perhaps the present verso was chosen to be laid down because it has a small indistinct compositional sketch at the right, recognizable when the sheet is turned 90 degrees to the right. It represents a seated figure accompanied by a reclining figure, within a drawn cadre, with an additional reclining figure to the left,^[1] which may have been considered less attractive and distracting attention from the main figure. Marciari (2018) relates this little sketch, which he rightly considers autograph, to paintings of the early 1550s.^[2] Earlier authors, including Tietze/Tietze-Conrat (1944) and Rossi (2011), rightly considered the recto drawing without the compositional sketch, which is the weaker of the two, as workshop material.^[3]

This drawing and those by Tintoretto or members of his workshop on five sheets, now in Oxford, Copenhagen, Berlin and Lausanne, record a statuette studied from different angles.^[4] The anonymous collector who annotated the Rotterdam sheet with the name of Giambologna (1529-1608) was the first to recognize a contemporary Mannerist source, probably in view of its general likeness to his monumental bronze statue of Neptune on the fountain in Bologna, erected in 1564-66, which also has a bent knee and an outstretched arm, with the head turned left. However, this statue postdates Tintoretto’s drawings. When it was first published in 1929, our drawing was described by David Roëll as a study after a plaster cast of a sculpture, probably by Michelangelo (1475-1564). Subsequent scholars, including Tietze/Tietze-Conrat (1944), Rossi (1975) and Byam Shaw (1976) did not attempt to identify the model. Davis (1984) pointed to the exaggerated contrapposto of the figure, which is alien to the principles of antique sculpture, but characteristic of Mannerism.^[5] He believes it was a lost clay bozzetto (model) by Michelangelo, possibly part of his unexecuted and lost design for the wall tomb of Pope Julius II (1443-1513). A bronze cast of this bozzetto, which was first published by Weihrauch (1967) when it was in a private collection in Milan and last recorded at Sotheby’s (1980), seems to be the obvious model for the drawings.^[6] The resemblance is most striking when the figure is viewed from the back - the only known image of the bronze - as in the Oxford and Krugier drawings. The bronze was at that time considered to be by a follower of Michelangelo (Weihrauch) and after a model attributed to him. This attribution to Michelangelo remains was not contested by Fischer (2018). That Tintoretto used a clay or wax bozzetto is evidenced by the prop beneath the bent left knee visible in three of the related drawings.

According to his contemporary Raffaello Borghini (1584), Tintoretto indeed considered ‘the divine’ Michelangelo as his principal source of inspiration, passionately acquiring reduced-sized plaster and terracotta replicas of his marble sculptures from Florence. First of all, however, Borghini explicitly states that Tintoretto made a great effort to study the statues of Mars and Neptune by Jacopo Sansovino (1486-1570).^[7] The former may be the ‘Mars’ which the Venetian publisher Francesco Marcolini da Forlì (1500-1559) received from Sansovino as a gift, together with a ‘Minerva’. The source for this is a letter dated 15 September 1551 directed to the writer Pietro Aretino (1491-1556), in which Marcolini also mentions that his friend Tintoretto visited him one evening and studied both statuettes, making drawings by candlelight.^[8] The ‘Mars’ is probably a replica of Sansovino’s anatomical model for a large bronze sculpture of Mars, one of four niche figures on the façade of the Loggetta on Piazza San Marco in Venice (c.1538-46), left of the entrance. Eventually, Sansovino abandoned the ‘Mars’ and used the model for the sculpture of Mercury (in armour) to the right of the entrance, mirroring the posture, with the right knee pulled up and the right arm raised. Both Krischel (2017) and Marciari (2018) consider the aforementioned bronze statue to be after a model by Sansovino rather than one by Michelangelo or a follower of his, as we believe.^[9]

The relation between the drawings and the figure of Apollo in Tintoretto’s early painting (c.1544-45) of The Musical Contest between Apollo and Marsyas in Hartford, as suggested by Von Hadeln (1922) and endorsed by Fischer (2018), does not seem plausible.^[10]