Male Nude Holding a Stick

Author: Albert Elen

This is probably a fragment of a larger sheet which was cropped to its present size when it was mounted in Giorgio Vasari’s (1511-1574) Libro de’ Disegni between c.1540 and 1574.^[1] Degenhart/Schmitt (1968) pointed to the traces of cadre lines on the bottom edge of this sheet (now hidden from view by the mount) and the companion sheet MB 976, also in Rotterdam, as well as the small protrusions in the latter sheet (the hand and pole) along the otherwise straight left and right margins of the accompanying sheet, which are characteristic of Vasari’s way of mounting drawings in his albums.

Both sheets have approximately equal dimensions, the red preparation is identical and the drawings on the recto sides are typologically and stylistically very close. Nevertheless, the two present sheets were not originally part of a single larger sheet, as the preparation of the reverse sides differ; one is a heavy green ground (MB 977 verso), the other a thin red layer (MB 976 verso), identical to that of the rectos.

The standing nude figure in contrapposto on the recto of this sheet was copied by a pupil in a drawing now in the Gozzoli Album (folio 6 verso), also in Rotterdam. That drawing, which concentrates on the muscular structure and less on the head and limbs, was then used in its turn as a model for a clothed version with heavy drapery next to it on the same sheet, as pointed out by Ames-Lewis (1995, 1998).

The single drawing of a foot on the verso (uncovered when the backing paper was removed during conservation treatment around 1990-95) is almost identical to the one on folio 8 recto of the Gozzoli Album (I 562), which is also placed on a highlighted plinth, casting a shadow to the left. However, the latter drawing is less convincing in the physical details and therefore a copy (after a copy, not necessarily the present drawing), like all drawings in the album. The album contains some more drawings of plaster casts of feet, all derived from earlier prototypes after sculptural fragments from the antique, on similarly green-prepared folios 5 verso and 6 recto.

Both this and the companion drawing stem from Frans Boijmans’s founding bequest of 1847 and were listed as by Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400-1464) in the first catalogue in 1852. Thanks to that erroneous listing they survived the disastrous fire of 1864, in which most drawings by non-Netherlandish masters perished.