Filippino Lippi

This is one of the finest extant drawings by the Florentine painter and draftsman Filippino Lippi. Both sides are freely executed in metalpoint, heightened with white opaque watercolor, on a light-gray prepared ground. Most passages appear to be in leadpoint and look silver gray. On the verso, however, Filippino heavily reworked the figure of the standing man holding a sword with a different stylus, probably silverpoint, which now shimmers golden brown. Typical of this period is the use of metalpoint to describe delicate contours as well as for vigorous and free hatching, anticipating the use of pen and ink, which was to become the preferred medium for artists in the following decades. White opaque watercolor highlights, already described by Cennino Cennini in his handbook on painting of the 1390s, were employed here to describe the effects of light and to create a quality of three-dimensionality.¹

By the mid-fifteenth century, it had become standard workshop practice in Florence to work from posed models; for the most part, they were young male studio assistants known in Italian as garzoni. In the present example, four figures strike poses that might be useful in working out a formal composition. For instance, the two figures on the recto approximate the depiction of a Noli me tangere, the scene in which Christ appears to the Magdalen after his resurrection and asks her not to touch him but to go to the disciples with the message that he has risen. The standing Christ appears at right with a hoe—the Magdalen had initially mistaken him for a gardener. Clearly, the figure at left, a study for the kneeling Magdalen holding a precious jar (in the biblical narrative, she had come to anoint the dead body), was taken from a male model, apparently the same one who posed for the figure of Christ. The artist went so far as to add haloes to the figures. The unusual proximity underscores that the two figures were conceived as separate studies rather than as a single compositional drawing; for a fresco or painting, they would have been set farther apart.

Even though at first glance it looks like the young man at right on the verso is passing something to his companion on the same page, here again the figures are independent of each other and were probably devised individually. These, too, are workshop models: the youth seen from the back holding a pole to support his raised right arm kneels on a studio prop, lightly indicated in the drawing. He could well have served as a spectator in an Adoration scene; it has been noted that he resembles the youth crouching on a ledge in Filippino’s Adoration of the Magi of 1496 in the Uffizi.² Furthermore, the stance of his regally expansive companion, who rests his right hand on the pommel of a sword, is not too far removed from that of the prominent member of the magi’s retinue standing in the foreground at lower right and gesturing toward the Christ child. A pentimento for the figure’s right foot and the continuation of his thigh beneath the heavy cloak prove this to be a working, exploratory drawing.

There are a large number of sheets by Filippino and members of his workshop executed in metalpoint on blue or gray paper in which male models strike poses with little or no convincing connection with extant paintings. A drawing by the artist in Berlin, showing two garzoni who seem to be posing for an Annunciation to the Virgin, is a case in point.³ In all likelihood the present double-sided sheet and the Berlin study were once part of a larger sketchbook, probably executed in 1482–83, that also included another closely related sheet of almost identical size with figure studies now in the British Museum.⁴ The artistic practice of keeping a book depicting figures posed in various attitudes and other motifs drawn from life grew out of the tradition of the medieval model book (see II, 2-25). The present study is likely to derive from one of these later sketchbooks, which served as exploratory tools for naturalistic representation and imaginative inventions. —REP

Footnotes:

1. Cennini 1932–33, chapters 31–32.
2. See New York 1965–66, no. 21.
3. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, KdZ 5043. See Schulze Altcappenberg 1995, 164–65. There is some disagreement on this point, with Shoemaker suggesting only the right-hand figure is for an Annunciation, and the left-hand one for an Adoration of the Magi, whereas Bambach considers them both preparatory to an Adoration (Shoemaker 1975, 207; Bambach in New York 1997–98, 155).
4. For the British Museum sheet, inv. 1895,0915.454, see New York 1997–98, no. 26; for a summary of the presumed sketchbook, see Shoemaker 1975, 112–13, 184–92, and New York 1997–98, 145.