Standing Male Figure with a Tall Hat

Author: Surya Stemerding

This standing figure facing three-quarters to the front is wearing torn clothes and has a cloth slung over his shoulders containing an object resembling a wooden panel. Shabby figures like this are mainly familiar from the northern artistic tradition, whereas tramps and beggars in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian paintings and drawings were either idealized or depicted as examples of a corrupt soul.^[1]

In this case, though, we must assume that we are dealing with an Italian draughtsman. The drawing, which is classified as North Italian in the inventory of the Koenigs Collection, was attributed by A.E. Popham to Giuseppe Cesari (il Cavaliere d’Arpino, 1568-1640) in the 1950s, but it does not fit his oeuvre in either style or subject.^[2] The anonymous artist lacked the skill to give his figure a convincing anatomy, so this is more a question of a mediocre copy after part of a painting than an invention of his own devising. Judging by the type of watermark, the paper is Tuscan, with the drawing datable to around 1525-75.