Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Figure Drawings from Renaissance/Mannerist Italy

Michelangelo Buonarroti
Study for Bacchus Sculpture
ca. 1501-1502
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Michelangelo Buonarroti
Study for Slave Sculpture 
ca. 1516-17
drawing
Musée du Louvre

attributed to Giovanni Angelo del Maino
Figure with Cloak
ca. 1520
drawing
Musée du Louvre

attributed to Giovanni Angelo del Maino
Figure carrying Columns
ca. 1520
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Baccio Bandinelli
Figure Study
ca. 1520
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Michelangelo Anselmi
Hercules and Antaeus
ca. 1520
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Giulio Romano
Figure throwing Rock 
ca. 1520-21
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Giulio Romano
Figure with Sword
ca. 1524
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Rosso Fiorentino
Mars in Niche
1526
drawing
(print study)
Musée du Louvre

Parmigianino (Francesco Mazzola)
Study for Diogenes
ca. 1526-27
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Agnolo Bronzino
Figure Study
ca. 1565-69
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Alessandro Allori
Pearl Diver
ca. 1570
drawing
(study for painting, Pearl Fishers)
Musée du Louvre

Bartolomeo Passarotti
Figure Study
before 1592
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Marcantonio Raimondi
Figure Study
before 1527
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Florentine Artist
Figures in Combat
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

"It is known that the great Bernini was one of those who refused to grant the Greeks the virtue of portraying either a more perfect nature or an ideal beauty in their figures.  He was, furthermore, of the opinion that nature was capable of bestowing on all its parts the necessary amount of beauty, and that the skill of art consisted in finding it.  He prided himself on having to overcome his earlier prejudice concerning the charms of the Medicean Venus, since, after painstaking study, he had been able to perceive occasionally these very charms in nature."

"It was the Venus therefore that taught him to discover beauties in nature which he had previously seen only in the statue and which, without the Venus, he would not have sought in nature.  Does it not follow then that the beauty of Greek statues is easier to discover than beauty in nature and that thus the former is more inspiring, less diffuse and more harmoniously united than the latter?  So the study of nature must be at best a longer and more difficult way to gain knowledge of perfect beauty than the study of antiquity, and Bernini, by directing young artists primarily toward the most beautiful in nature, was not showing them the shortest way."

– Johann Joachim Winckelmann, from Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755), translated by Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton