Detail from Michelangelo's 'Children's Bacchanal'

Author: Rosie Razzall

The subject of this drawing is a group of children attempting to force a deer into a cooking pot, and reproduces the central motif of the drawing of a Bacchanal of Children by Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564) in red chalk at Windsor.^[1] Michelangelo’s sheet is one of the highly finished gift drawings made in the early 1530s for the Roman nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri (c.1512/1519-1587), intended as moralizing compositions to warn the young man of the perils of drunkenness, debauchery, and hubris.^[2]

Michelangelo’s gift drawings were widely renowned in his lifetime and after his death, and were shown by Cavalieri to Pope Clement VII, cardinals and many cognoscenti (connoisseurs) in Rome. The Bacchanal of Children is among Michelangelo’s drawings mentioned by Vasari.^[3] Cavalieri also provided access to the drawings for reproductive printmakers, whose prints contributed to the dissemination of Michelangelo’s compositions. Two early prints were made after the drawing while it was still in Cavalieri’s possession: an engraving by Enea Vico (1523-1567), published in 1545,^[4] followed by another engraving by Nicolas Beatrizet (1507/1515-c.1565) published shortly afterwards in c. 1546.^[5] Copies after Beatrizet by an anonymous engraver were published by Antonio Lafreri in 1553 and 1555.^[6] The prints by Beatrizet and Lafreri are in the same direction as Michelangelo’s drawing, but, like this drawing, Enea Vico’s print is in the opposite direction to Michelangelo’s original. In fact, the finely drawn pen-and-ink lines of the Rotterdam drawing follow the individual lines of Vico’s burin so closely that it is clearly a copy drawing made after Vico’s print. The figures were not traced, as the print is larger in scale than the drawing, and indeed there are black chalk pentimenti where the artist first worked out the rough positions of each figure before finalizing them in pen and ink. The artist concentrated his attention on the varied poses of the children, with the deer at the centre left unfinished.

Adriaan Domela Nieuwenhuis added the pencil inscription on the verso, believing that the drawing was by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) or his school.^[7] Among Rubens’s many drawings and paintings after Italian and Northern artists were indeed copies after Michelangelo, most of which were chalk drawings made in front of the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.^[8] However, given this access to original examples, Rubens did not make copies of prints after Michelangelo, largely confining such treatment to the Northern school. The attribution to Rubens certainly appears unfounded, especially when compared with his fluid pen drawings after prints after Tobias Stimmer (1539-1584), one of which is also in Rotterdam (MB 5000).^[9] As the drawing passed through the hands of two dealers in Milan in the nineteenth century, it seems most plausible that it had always been in Italy and was made by an unknown artist at the height of Michelangelo’s influence in the middle of the sixteenth century. Both printmakers and artists drew copies after prints as part of their training,^[10] and the drawing was probably a study exercise made as an end in itself. Jeremy Wood has noted that despite the misleading attribution, Domela Nieuwenhuis’s knowledge of Rubens’s copies is surprisingly early, as most were not known or published until 1928 or later.^[11] The drawing therefore holds unusual historiographical interest.