Seated Lute Player with a Hat

Author: Surya Stemerding

This is one of Annibale Carracci’s early drawings, made when he was about twenty-five years old. The figure of the seated lute player was put down in swift, assured lines. Here and there, such as below the right sleeve, the outlines were drawn in a single movement without lifting the chalk from the paper. The volume was indicated with diagonal hatching in the shaded passages while the light areas were left blank. Deeper shadows were created by pressing the chalk harder.

Carracci did not use a posed model or draped lay figure for this study, as was customary at that time. The apparently singing player was drawn directly from life, sheltering under his hat on a hot, sunny day, probably just out in the street.

Three other figure studies from this same early period attest to the importance the artist attached to direct observation of everyday situations. These studies, in Florence and Windsor, are slightly more worked out than the drawing in Rotterdam.^[1] In drawing from life, Carracci departed from the practice of predecessors like Vincenzo Campi (c.1530-1591) and Bartolomeo Passarotti (1529-1592), who often depicted genre subjects alla fantasia, in a grotesque form and with a moralizing undertone. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, following Carracci, artists began to record street life more frequently.^[2]