A standing Man seen from behind, one Knee resting on a Ledge

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was a prolific draughtsman, but figure studies account for a relatively small portion of his graphic output. Rapid, informal sketches like the present one were neither academic exercises nor preparatory studies, as very few were ever translated directly into Piranesi’s prints, although his views of ancient and modern Rome are often populated with figures closely akin to those seen in these drawings.

These figure studies seem to be the working of a restless hand and a curious mind, a sort of artistic tinkering as Piranesi constantly sketched those before him. An early biography of the artist, written by Jacques Guillaume Legrand before 1799, remarked that Piranesi regularly carried with him paper and chalk and drew constantly in his spare time. As noted by Hylton Thomas, Piranesi’s figure studies invariably depict figures in movement, as it was the human figure in action, rather than the human body per se, that most interested the artist (H. Thomas, The Drawings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, New York, 1954, p. 26). For these quick sketches Piranesi often employed discarded scraps of paper: on the verso of the present sheet are mathematical calculations.

A comparable sketch in pen and ink of a man in a waistcoat kneeling is in a private collection in New York (Wolk-Simon and Bambach, op. cit., no. 69, ill.). The present sheet has been dated by Andrew Robison to the first half of the 1760s.