Male Nude Holding a Stick and Wearing a Hat with Three Feathers

Author: Albert Elen

Melli (2000) has pointed to the close resemblance in pose of our nude figure – a classical contrapposto – to that of the figure of the Ostrogoth king Totila, clad in armour, in the foreground (left of the two horsemen) in Gozzoli’s drawing The Siege of Perugia, now in Florence.^[1]

The drawing on the reverse was uncovered when the backing paper was removed during conservation treatment in around 1990-95. Judging from the fragmented figure at the verso’s left edge, this is probably a fragment of a larger sheet which was cropped to its present size when it was mounted in Giorgio Vasari’s (1511-1574) Libro de’ Disegni between c.1540 and 1574.^[2] Degenhart/Schmitt (1968), who were not aware of the hidden verso drawing, pointed to the traces of cadre lines on the bottom edge of this sheet and the companion sheet MB 977, also in Rotterdam, as well as the small protrusions (the hand and pole) along the otherwise straight left and right margins of the present sheet, which are characteristic of Vasari’s way of mounting drawings in his albums. Both sheets have approximately equal dimensions, the red preparation is identical and the drawings on the recto sides are typologically and stylistically very close. Nevertheless, the two present sheets were not originally part of a single larger sheet, as the preparation of the reverse sides differ; one is a heavy green ground (MB 977 verso), the other a thin red layer (MB 976 verso), identical to that of the rectos.

Both drawings stem from Frans Boijmans’s founding bequest of 1847 and were listed as by Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400-1464) in the first catalogue in 1852. Thanks to that erroneous listing they survived the disastrous fire of 1864, in which most drawings by non-Netherlandish masters perished.