Figure with a Bare Shoulder

Author: Esmé van der Krieke

The outlines of this figure, shown from behind looking over its shoulder with a penetrating gaze, are drawn on paper with powerful black chalk lines. The generously applied white heightening lights up the shoulder, arm and face. A vertical line running through the figure’s forehead and nose was used by the artist as an aid in capturing the curvature of the face. This line, like the pentimenti by the left shoulder and the swift lines that suggest it, are an indication that the sheet is a fairly spontaneous study of most likely a live model. Although it is not immediately clear whether a man or woman is depicted, in 1934 and 1935 the drawing was exhibited as a study of a female nude.^[1] 

The sheet has had a number of attributions. Earlier collectors attributed it to Bernardino Luini (1480/1482-1532), while according to an inscription on the verso, the artist Bernardino Lanino (ca. 1509/1513-ca. 1583) was also considered. Both attributions were rejected by Philip Pouncey, who suggested Lanino’s teacher Gaudenzio Ferrari (1477/1478-1546).^[2] What all these artists have in common is that they were active in the regions of Lombardy and Piedmont in the first half of the sixteenth century. The use of black chalk in combination with white heightening, contrasting with the greyish-blue paper, is indeed a stylistic characteristic of this circle of artists, as examples in Paris (Luini),^[3] New York (Lanino),^[4] London^[5] and Varallo (Ferrari)^[6] show. Inspired by the sfumato technique that Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) had introduced in Milan, the shadows in their figure studies often have a hazy glow. In our drawing this can be seen in the underarm and left cheek.  

Although it is plausible on stylistic grounds that the drawing was done in sixteenth-century Lombardy or Piedmont, a specific attribution for this fascinating sheet remains uncertain. All the same, the predominantly thick lines and rough shadows come closer to Ferrari and Lanino’s manner than to Luini’s fine outlines. The incomplete character of the drawing could suggest that the figure served as an early study in the process of making a painting or fresco. Both Ferrari’s and Lanino’s artworks often show such secondary figures with a similar position and/or fixed gaze at the viewer, such as the woman pictured upper right in Ferrari’s The Martyrdom of St Catherine in Milan^[7] and St John the Baptist in the right foreground of Lanino’s Crucifixion in Biella.^[8] Our drawing could possibly have served in the creation of a similar figure that was part of a larger composition. Since Ferrari’s subtle and telling depiction of figures influenced artists until deep into the sixteenth century, the maker of the similar Rotterdam drawing is sought for the first time in his environs and dated to the first half of the sixteenth century.