Study of a Standing Male Nude with Folded Hands

Author: Albert Elen

This drawing is one of a large group of more than seventy sheets of similar figure studies inscribed ‘G. Tintoretto’ in pen and brown ink, which remained together after they were sold by the artist’s aged son-in-law, Sebastiano Casser, in the 1640s, ultimately entering the collection of the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) some time in the second half of the eighteenth century.^[1] Five of these sheets came to Rotterdam with the Koenigs Collection in 1935.^[2]

Although the ‘Reynolds group’ consists of drawings by several members of the Tintoretto workshop, many are considered autograph drawings by Jacopo. The authenticity of this drawing is undisputed. It was first published by Von Hadeln (1922) in his monograph on Jacopo Tintoretto’s drawings. He compared our study, together with a similar one of a kneeling figure, now in Florence,^[3] with shepherds in the painting The Nativity and the Adoration of the Christ Child (1583), now in the Escorial, as examples of the artist’s preparation of clothed figures in paintings by drawing nude studies first.^[4] The attribution of the painting is, however, not undisputed, and the resemblance is superficial.

Rossi (1975) considers our drawing weak and hastily executed, dating from the final years of the artist’s career. She does not link our drawing to the identically classified drawing illustrated immediately next to ours in her oeuvre catalogue of Jacopo’s drawings: a very similar study now in London.^[5] Although the sizes differ, the London sheet being somewhat smaller, the figures seem to correlate. Judging from the pentimenti in the lower arms, the London drawing is probably the prima idea, which was subsequently squared and transferred to the Rotterdam sheet. There the figure was given a more elegant but slightly unbalanced pose, as if leaning against something, the hands joined and the head turned right, looking away instead of downward.^[6] In its turn, the Rotterdam drawing was also squared and transferred, but we know of no painting where it figures in the composition, not even the monumental, heavily populated The Last Judgment in the Madonna dell’Orto, Venice (c.1562-64), as suggested by Tietze/Tietze-Conrat (1944). The only similarity that can be established is with the standing figure at far left in Tintoretto’s The Last Supper (fig.) in the presbytery of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, his last large commission, which was executed to his designs and under his supervision by his son Domenico (1560-1635) in circa 1592-94. The figure in the painting is in mirror image, leaning with his buttocks against the wall, and holding a stick in his folded arms.^[7]

Without linking our drawing to any painting, Marciari proposes a date around 1588-90 on purely stylistic grounds.^[8] The supposed connection to the painting, however, justifies a slightly later date, circa 1591-92, in the early design phase of the painting. This drawing and one by Domenico, also in Rotterdam (I 75), are the only surviving preliminary drawings for The Last Supper.