Study of a Standing Man with a Stick

Author: Albert Elen

According to Rearick (2001) and Marciari (2018), this is an unused study related to the man at upper left in The Gathering of Manna, a huge canvas with a densely populated composition, painted by Jacopo Tintoretto and his son Domenico (1560-1635) for the presbytery of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice (1592-94).^[1] However, that figure, clothed and standing with two others at an anvil, is seen from the back.^[2] The silhouettes are apparently similar, but on closer inspection there is no real connection. A functional link with Tintoretto’s lost painting The Naval Battle of Lepanto has also been suggested, but tentatively (and unverifiable).^[3] Our study can rather be linked to the main figure in The Naval Battle on the Lago di Garda, one of four nearly octagonal large ceiling paintings in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Palazzo Ducale, Venice, executed by the workshop on the basis of Jacopo’s designs in 1579-82.^[4] The resemblance lies mainly in the energetic pose with the legs apart, the upper body bent to the side and the upheld left arm partly covering the head. The main difference is the painted warrior holding a shield on his left arm and a sword in his right hand, instead of a stick.

Another nude study by Tintoretto in Rotterdam (I 80) is also related to this figure in the naval battle.^[5] The two drawings share stylistic characteristics in the bulbous anatomy, the so-called sacco di noce (bag of nuts) style found mostly in Jacopo’s late drawings from the mid-1570s onwards.^[6] The way the legs are drawn with broken contours and parallel curved hatchings on the upper legs to give them a three-dimensional effect is also typical of the artist, as are the pentimenti in the arm holding the stick. The attribution to Jacopo, accepted by Tietze/Tietze-Conrat (1944) and Rearick (2001), is therefore more convincing than one to Domenico, as proposed by both Rossi (2007) and Marciari (2018).

Figure studies like these, made after life models often placed in the most contorted positions, were kept by the hundreds in the workshop stock as a repertory of forms and motifs for future use, both didactic and practical.^[7] They were stored in portfolios or pasted on canvas rolls, with no distinction between studies by the master and his apprentices. Several years later, our study may very well have served as a starting point for the figure of St Christopher in Tintoretto’s Paradise of circa 1588, now in Madrid (fig.), which is the second of two large painted composition designs for the huge wall painting in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice.^[8] This figure, at lower centre right of the crowded composition, is very similar to our study, with the same twist in the torso, the right knee slightly bent and the right arm lowered, holding a small sphere. Otherwise, the left arm of St Christopher was modified, now outstretched and holding a staff.

On the reverse is a drawing of a female bust which Tietze/Tietze-Conrat (1944) considered to be by the artist’s daughter Marietta Robusti (c.1560-1590), called La Tintoretta. It is probably related, as a copy, to the prominent female sculpture in Jacopo Tintoretto’s portrait of artist and antiquarian Ottavio Strada (1549/50-1612), dated 1567, now in Amsterdam.^[9]