Standing Male Nude Facing Right

Author: Esmé van der Krieke

Vague, rough lines in black chalk create the outlines of a standing male figure leaning on a staff. At the upper left hovers an angel tapping the man on the shoulder, while the rounded lines lower left are difficult to define. The rendition of the scene is so schematic that it is unclear exactly who is depicted here. The staff could suggest that the nude man is John the Baptist, but he is almost never pictured with an angel at his side. The two figures should probably be seen as preparatory studies, whether copies of existing works or elements of a larger composition in which the man and the angel served as secondary figures.

Although the drawing was attributed to Palma Giovane (1548/1550-1628) when in the collection of the Venetian art collector Zaccaria Sagredo,^[1] and the inscription ‘Palma’ lower right on the front of the drawing also points in the direction of this artist, that attribution is nonetheless unconvincing. Palma’s chalk drawings are typically done in clean, sharp lines, paying considerable attention to the anatomy of figures, as can be seen in an example in London.^[2] In our drawing, on the other hand, it is clear from the tentative lines that the artist was trying to find the right pose and proportions of the male figure.

It is nevertheless still likely that the maker worked in the vicinity of Venice, since most of the drawings Zaccaria Sagredo owned came from the studios of Venetian artists. In the elongated figure with the pointed feet, Chris Fischer also recognized the Mannerist style of the Venetian artist Andrea Schiavone (1510/1515-1563), and suggested that the Rotterdam drawing was made in his circle.^[3] Examples in Windsor and Paris do indeed show somewhat similar elongated figures that Schiavone likewise drew quite loosely.^[4] However, he often used more techniques in his drawings, and his figure studies are more subtle and carefully worked out than ours; hasty black chalk drawings like this one do not occur in his oeuvre. It is more likely that our drawing was done by a less experienced artist or a pupil. The anonymous maker of this drawing is therefore located for the time being in sixteenth-century Venice, while the Mannerist execution of the elongated figure is closer to Schiavone than Palma.