Domenico Beccafumi

The drawing has been trimmed along the right, but the original appearance of the recto is preserved a copy from the so-called Beccafumi sketchbook, formerly in the collection of Coghlan Briscoe.¹ This reveals that both legs of the reclining figure at right were somewhat raised and that the left arm rested on the left leg. Neither the recto nor the verso of the present drawing may be linked with any certainty to any of Beccafumi’s commissions. On stylistic grounds, Barbara Pike Gordley dated the sheet to the 1530s, during the time in which Beccafumi was working on the pavement for Siena Cathedral.² Indeed, the shallow grouping of the figures is similar in both the drawing and the pavement mosaics. Furthermore, the reclining male nude in the lower right on the recto of the Morgan sheet is close in spirit to a similar figure left of center in the frieze of Moses Striking the Rock and, in reverse, to one near the edge in the upper right quadrant of Moses on Mount Sinai.³ The figure is also a close companion of a reclining male nude in a drawing in the Albertina, considered preparatory to a woodcut that was never executed.⁴

The verso shows the artist continuing to experiment with closely related poses for the male nude; in fact the standing youth is a pendant, in reverse, to the central figure on the recto of the sheet, and also not far removed from a lightly sketched figure on the verso of another sheet in the Morgan’s collection.⁵ The sources of inspiration are Michelangelo’s sculptures, in particular, those of Dusk and Dawn in the Medici Chapel, Florence, ca. 1524-33, and antique sculptures of the Hellenistic period. In 1967, Donato Sanminiatelli noted that the verso might have been a primo pensiero for Beccafumi’s most famous engraving of around 1531 of Two Nudes in a Landscape,⁶ for which there is a preparatory drawing in red chalk, traced over in black chalk, in the Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth.⁷ Like the print, the verso of the present sheet depicts two nude men, one standing and the other reclining, though their poses differ from the Morgan study. In the print, the standing nude is much more dramatic, lunging forward with his arms raised. He now stands in front of the reclining nude, thereby creating a tighter grouping, a deeper space and vertical composition.

In addition to those mentioned above, several further copies after the Morgan sheet survive. The ex-Briscoe sketchbook includes a further, more strongly abbreviated copy, of the reclining figure on the recto.⁸ A sheet of studies in the Uffizi, Florence, includes at left a copy of the standing male nude from the left of the recto.⁹ The reclining bearded nude on the verso reappears in another sheet by a Beccafumi follower in the Biblioteca Comunale, Siena.¹⁰ A partial copy in black chalk, attributed to Francesco Vanni by Peter A. Riedl, is in the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence.¹¹ Another drawing in the Biblioteca Comunale, ascribed by Gordley to the workshop of Beccafumi, reproduces both figures of the verso, while a sheet in the Chigi-Saraceni collection, Siena, which Fabio Bisogni attributed to the master, twice depicts the standing youth.¹³

Footnotes:

1. Liphart-Rathshoff 1935, fig. 49.
2. Gordley 1988, 278.
3. Torriti 1998, 206-07; Sanminiatelli 1967, 105, no. 48.
4. Albertina, Vienna, inv. 276; Birke and Kertész 1992, 163, no. 276.
5. Morgan Library & Museum, New York, inv. 1964.14.
6. Sanminiatelli 1967, 132, no. 2; Torriti 1998, 328-29, no. D155.
7. Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth, inv. 6; Torriti 1998, 305-06, no. D113.
8. Liphart-Rathshoff 1935, fig. 35.
9. Uffizi, Florence, inv. 14001F.
10. Biblioteca Comunale, Siena, inv. S.II.5, fol. 7 verso.
11. Uffizi, Florence, inv. 1192S; Siena 1990, 415, fig. 6.
12. Biblioteca Comunale, Siena, inv. S.III.2, fol. 16 recto; Gordley 1988, 394, under no. 84, 442, no. 45x.
13. Bisogni 1981, 37, no. 12.