Folio from the Gozzoli Album: Seated and a Reclining Male Nude, the Latter in Foreshortening

Author: Albert Elen

This is a folio from a hypothetical lost drawing book, a remnant of which is now part of an eighteenth-century album called the Gozzoli Album, held in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. For a general description, see here.

This page was originally folio 51 recto in the hypothetical lost volume (now also a recto in the album). The finger smudges in the lower right corner confirm that this was originally a recto page.

The figure drawings on four violet prepared pages (folio 9 verso, 10 recto, 11 verso, 12 recto) technically match a drawing of standing young man, rendered in frontal view with the pen and white heightening on a violet ground, now in Vienna (Albertina, inv. 12 recto), which is also listed by Degenhart/Schmitt (1968, no. 462) as a work from the Gozzoli workshop and originating from the hypothetical lost drawing book.

As noted by Ames-Lewis (1995 and 1998) the seated figure on this page seems to be indirectly inspired by the classical model of Lo Spinario, a renowned bronze Roman sculpture from the first century BC, which had been held in the Lateran in Rome since the twelfth century, until Pope Sixtus IV (1414-1484) moved it to the Capitoline in 1471.^[1] The pose of the drawn figure is, however, seen in mirror image and it seems that the drawing of which this is a copy was a study of a young man assuming a pose similar to the famous sculpture, whether by intention or chance. The seated figure can be compared with a similar drawing in London, which must have belonged to the same lost volume, also in view of the old foliation ‘26’ at lower left.^[2]

The reclining figure below, represented in foreshortening, probably can be indirectly traced back (as a copy after a copy) to perspective studies, instigated by the Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) in his treatise Della Pittura of 1436 and found in several contemporary battle scenes, first of all in Paolo Uccello's (1397-1475) paintings of The Battle of San Romano, now in London, Paris and Florence, dated c.1435-50. There is also a striking similarity with a drawing of a foreshortened dead Christ by Andrea Mantegna (1430/1431-1506) from the early 1460s, now in a private collection in Milan, which shows a figure lying on his back in almost the same pose, but with his legs outstretched.^[3] A similar figure, in much the same foreshortened pose, is found in the left lower corner of Gozzoli’s (now destroyed) fresco The Destruction of Sodom in the Camposanto in Pisa. The fresco is dated 1474 but this is not to be considered a terminus post quem (earliest possible date) for the drawing because it was most probably not copied after the fresco but after an earlier drawing in the workshop thesaurus, which was later on also used for the fresco.^[4]