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Lot Essay
This unpublished drawing, one of the most exciting discoveries made in the field of Old Master Drawings in recent decades, is an important addition to a small group of drawings by Michelangelo from the 1490s, copied from works by earlier Florentine masters. ‘He drew for many months from the pictures of Masaccio in the Carmine,’ Giorgio Vasari wrote in his 1568 life of Michelangelo, referring to the paintings by the early fifteenth-century painter Masaccio (1401-1428) in Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence’s Oltrarno quarter, ‘where he copied those works with so much judgment, that the craftsmen and all other men were astonished, in such sort that envy grew against him together with his fame.’ Vasari’s statement is confirmed by two further, wellknown studies of similarly impressive size after Masaccio’s frescoes in the church, either after the celebrated but lost painting depicting the monastery’s consecration, or those still visible in the Brancacci chapel from 1425-1427, nicknamed by Bernard Berenson the ‘Sistine chapel of the early Renaissance’: a drawing in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich (inv. 2191), and a double-sided sheet at the Albertina, Vienna (inv. 116). These drawings can be dated to the time when Michelangelo enjoyed the protection of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and later of his son Piero de’ Medici, who encouraged the young artist’s study of antique sculpture and early Renaissance art in the years immediately preceding the creation of some of his most famous works, such as the Pietà in Saint Peter’s, Rome (1498-1499), and the marble David in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (1501-1504). An earlier drawing, possibly datable to the early 1490s, is a copy after a fresco at Santa Croce by another foundational force in early Italian painting, Giotto (1266/1276-1337), and is at the Musée du Louvre (inv. 706). The pen technique of all of the drawings mentioned is strongly indebted to that of Michelangelo’s first teacher, Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494), with whom he studied in the years around 1490.
At its centre, the new drawing reproduces the shivering man at right in the Baptism of the Neophytes (Acts of the Apostles 2:41), one of Masaccio’s frescoes illustrating the life of Saint Peter in the Brancacci chapel. Drawing in pen and brown ink, Michelangelo built up the volume of the figure’s nude body in a closeknit web of fine hatching and cross-hatching. However, at a somewhat later point, he extensively reworked his copy in pen and brush and an ink of a darker hue, changing the position of the legs and feet, redrawing the back of the head, and enhancing the man’s musculature along his back and buttocks, in effect creating before our eyes the powerful, robust figure style that would become the hallmark of Michelangelo’s own and that of countless followers in the later sixteenth century and beyond. In a quite different, more energetic style, he also added the figures behind the man, unrelated to Masaccio’s composition, which appear to be done at a later date, and recall figures in a double-sided drawing at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem (inv. A 022), often dated around 1500.
The drawing presented here is probably the earliest surviving nude study by an artist who, more than any other in the history of art, explored in his work the expressive power of the human, and in particular the male body. In sculpture such as the giant David in Florence, the pair of Slaves in the Musée du Louvre, or in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo established once and for all the use of the nude to convey drama and beauty in muscular figures of monumental proportions, creating a model for innumerable artists of generations and centuries to come. The drawing stands at the very beginning of this modern manner, and was made, as said, at a time when Michelangelo also copied the artists of the past – those of antiquity and of the more recent Florentine artistic tradition – and is said to have studied anatomy on corpses made available to him at the convent of Santo Spirito, of which Piero de’ Medici was a protector. In the reworking of the central figure, and the addition of the two figures behind him, the drawing embodies both the backward-looking and forward-looking impulses in Michelangelo’s art at this moment in his development. The sheet appears to have been retained by him throughout his life, and the figure based on the Brancacci fresco inspired him in the late drawings of the Crucifixion in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle (inv.RCIN 912761, RCIN 912775) and in the British Museum (inv. 1895,0915.509), in which the despairing Virgin or Saint John the Evangelist are depicted in the pose of Masaccio’s shivering man. In a study at the Louvre (inv. 698) related to these works, Saint John adopts the same pose.
Until it was recognized as the work of Michelangelo in 2019 by Furio Rinaldi, then a specialist in Christie’s department of Old Master Drawings, the present work had escaped the attention of scholars. In the eighteenth century, the drawing belonged to Commendatore Modesto Genevosio, a distinguished Turinese collector who, according to the inscriptions on his mount, believed it to be by the late sixteenth-century Bolognese painter Pietro Faccini, whose eccentric style has little in common with Michelangelo’s formidable manner. In 1907 the drawing last appeared on the market at an auction held at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, where it was offered as the work of an artist from the school of Michelangelo. We are grateful to Paul Joannides for supporting the attribution to Michelangelo after studying it de visu in the Spring of 2019, and for writing an extensive study on the work. The drawing will be published in a forthcoming article by Furio Rinaldi, currently curator of drawings and prints at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
At its centre, the new drawing reproduces the shivering man at right in the Baptism of the Neophytes (Acts of the Apostles 2:41), one of Masaccio’s frescoes illustrating the life of Saint Peter in the Brancacci chapel. Drawing in pen and brown ink, Michelangelo built up the volume of the figure’s nude body in a closeknit web of fine hatching and cross-hatching. However, at a somewhat later point, he extensively reworked his copy in pen and brush and an ink of a darker hue, changing the position of the legs and feet, redrawing the back of the head, and enhancing the man’s musculature along his back and buttocks, in effect creating before our eyes the powerful, robust figure style that would become the hallmark of Michelangelo’s own and that of countless followers in the later sixteenth century and beyond. In a quite different, more energetic style, he also added the figures behind the man, unrelated to Masaccio’s composition, which appear to be done at a later date, and recall figures in a double-sided drawing at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem (inv. A 022), often dated around 1500.
The drawing presented here is probably the earliest surviving nude study by an artist who, more than any other in the history of art, explored in his work the expressive power of the human, and in particular the male body. In sculpture such as the giant David in Florence, the pair of Slaves in the Musée du Louvre, or in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo established once and for all the use of the nude to convey drama and beauty in muscular figures of monumental proportions, creating a model for innumerable artists of generations and centuries to come. The drawing stands at the very beginning of this modern manner, and was made, as said, at a time when Michelangelo also copied the artists of the past – those of antiquity and of the more recent Florentine artistic tradition – and is said to have studied anatomy on corpses made available to him at the convent of Santo Spirito, of which Piero de’ Medici was a protector. In the reworking of the central figure, and the addition of the two figures behind him, the drawing embodies both the backward-looking and forward-looking impulses in Michelangelo’s art at this moment in his development. The sheet appears to have been retained by him throughout his life, and the figure based on the Brancacci fresco inspired him in the late drawings of the Crucifixion in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle (inv.RCIN 912761, RCIN 912775) and in the British Museum (inv. 1895,0915.509), in which the despairing Virgin or Saint John the Evangelist are depicted in the pose of Masaccio’s shivering man. In a study at the Louvre (inv. 698) related to these works, Saint John adopts the same pose.
Until it was recognized as the work of Michelangelo in 2019 by Furio Rinaldi, then a specialist in Christie’s department of Old Master Drawings, the present work had escaped the attention of scholars. In the eighteenth century, the drawing belonged to Commendatore Modesto Genevosio, a distinguished Turinese collector who, according to the inscriptions on his mount, believed it to be by the late sixteenth-century Bolognese painter Pietro Faccini, whose eccentric style has little in common with Michelangelo’s formidable manner. In 1907 the drawing last appeared on the market at an auction held at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, where it was offered as the work of an artist from the school of Michelangelo. We are grateful to Paul Joannides for supporting the attribution to Michelangelo after studying it de visu in the Spring of 2019, and for writing an extensive study on the work. The drawing will be published in a forthcoming article by Furio Rinaldi, currently curator of drawings and prints at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.