Standing Figure with a Baton

Author: Klazina Botke

Over the last century this forceful drawing of a standing figure looking out at the viewer has had various attributions, among others to Taddeo Zuccaro (1529-1566).^[1] In the 1960s Philip Pouncey suggested the name Raffaellino da Reggio and this attribution was recently supported by Furio Rinaldi.^[2] The work does indeed match Raffaellino’s style as presented in the recent catalogue of his drawn oeuvre.^[3] Iron gall ink corrosion has cost the drawing some of its subtlety, but the flowing curved line is still recognizable. The figure is built up according to a method that is typical of most of Raffaellino’s drawings: first the silhouette is put in with chalk and worked out further with pen and ink.^[4] The characteristic dark washes, that for example can also be seen in a sheet in Lille, are also clearly present.^[5] In his own time, Raffaellino’s playfulness with chiaroscuro attracted the attention of Karel van Mander, who remarked in his Schilder-boeck that Raffaellino’s grisailles contain deep, almost black shadows and great rilievo: ‘He had a manner, when required, of greatly shading his work through to black, and this, at a distance, gave his works great power.’^[6]

Between 1569 and 1570 Raffaellino went to Rome, where he worked with Federico Zuccaro (c.1540-1609) and later also with Lorenzo Sabbatini (c.1530-1576).^[7] During his short life he was one of the rising stars in Rome.^[8] His association with Federico clearly had an influence on his approach, although Rinaldi observes that we rather find the elegant style of Federico’s brother Taddeo in Raffaellino’s work, such as the flowing lines, the copious use of washes and strong chiaroscuro.^[9] This may also have been the reason why Gere regarded the Rotterdam drawing as a work by Taddeo. The choice of blue paper and the use of white heightening to model the figure point in the direction of the beginning of Raffaellino’s Roman period, in which he still retained the style of his native region.^[10]

The Rotterdam drawing is squared for transfer to another support and along the man’s back there are already colour indications for the finished work: A for azzurro (blue), V for verde (green) and G for giallo (yellow).^[11] The sheet could be a preliminary study for one of the many fresco cycles that Raffaellino painted in Rome. Sadly, a considerable proportion of these decorations has been lost, as have almost all of the paintings recorded in sources.^[12]

There is an obvious correction on the figure’s left arm, where the limb was redrawn on a loose piece of paper which was placed over the original sheet. The grid on this scrap is slightly out of line; apparently the artist adjusted the position a little more while pasting it onto the sheet. The whole drawing was later stuck onto a new piece of blue paper. The same process can be seen in another drawing by Raffaellino, now in Liverpool.^[13] There the image consists of three separate sheets of paper that were stuck together by Raffaellino himself as part of the creative process.^[14] To make this process easier to understand, our drawing was photographed with infrared (IRP) in 2020. This, to our surprise, revealed a large study of a hand, drawn on the verso of the original sheet, probably in black chalk (fig.).