Two Seated Young Men

Author: Maud Guichané

Two seated young boys, dressed in clothes similar to those worn by apprentice painters in sixteenth century Florence, slide their fingers between the pages of a large book,^[1] as if they have been interrupted while reading. The boy facing us picks his nose with his left hand. This scene, captured in bold red chalk lines, is striking for its instantaneous, even incongruous nature,^[2] and immerses us into Pontormo’s everyday life. The drawing – and a number of other similar studies from the artist’s corpus^[3] – is an essential milestone in a Florentine tradition that originated with the garzoni (apprentices) studies produced in the workshops of the early Renaissance. It culminated in the informal studies of contemporary figures, almost genre scenes, that developed there in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by artists such as Bernadino Poccetti (1548-1612) and Jacopo da Empoli (1551-1640).^[4] The reverse of our sheet shows at lower left a small sketch in black chalk and stump of a male head wearing a hat, turned to the left and looking upwards.

Although executed as an independent work without a painting in mind, the artist’s attempts on both sides of the sheet to capture a scene unfolding before his eyes can be linked to major works by Pontormo painted in the first half of the 1520s.^[5] The head study on the verso refers to the male figure with basket on the left of the famous lunette of Vertumnus and Pomona, frescoed in the Medici villa in Poggio a Caiano in 1519-1521.^[6] The position and expression of the head are indeed very similar. Other preparatory drawings for the same figure also show that Pontormo had originally conceived it with him wearing a hat.^[7]

The artist’s complex process for defining the attitude of his figures is reflected in his preparatory work for the two disciples seated in the foreground of The Supper at Emmaus (fig.).^[8] Intended for the guest quarters of the Carthusian monastery at Galluzzo, this painting, now in Florence, was painted in 1525 by Pontormo.

The connection between the recto of our sheet and this painting is not immediately obvious,^[9] and most authors have not included it among the preliminary drawings for this work.^[10] In a way, they are right, in the sense that the drawing itself was not made with the painting in mind. But there is no doubt that Pontormo referred to the drawing when preparing it.

Another drawing in Florence,^[11] a study of a nude man seated and seen from behind, is considered by Cox Rearick to be preliminary to the disciple on the left of the painted composition. But it is interesting to note that if the image is reversed along a vertical axis,^[12] the general attitude of the figure corresponds more closely to that of the young man on the right of the Rotterdam sheet. Two other drawings, preserved in Munich, therefore come into play.^[13] The verso of the first Munich drawing represents an intermediate stage in the conception of these figures. The sketch at the top leads almost directly to the final study in the other Munich drawing, for the disciple pouring wine on the left of the painting. In the study at the bottom of the first sheet, the man also appears to be pouring, but the characteristic position of the head is taken from the nude study in Florence and, once again inverted, corresponds very closely to the Rotterdam drawing. It is therefore a step towards the final study for the disciple holding the bread, on the right of the painting and represented on the recto of the first Munich sheet.

This intertwining of drawn experiments is characteristic of Pontormo’s preparatory work for his paintings.^[14] Here, Pontormo’s invocation of the natural, immediate character of a scene caught on the spot, of fleeting glimpses and improvised gestures, is fully justified in the quest for naturalism that marked his art at the time. Already present in the arcadian, rustic vein of the Poggio a Caiano decoration,^[15] this quest was fully expressed with a certain modernity in The Supper at Emmaus. This interest manifested itself in different ways. In addition to the scenes of everyday life and the memory of the poses found and inserted in the paintings, the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) in his Little Passion had a profound influence on Pontormo in his projects for Galluzzo, including The Supper at Emmaus.^[16] The Rotterdam drawing thus embodies the link between two of Pontormo’s major works, in which he masterfully exalts the maniera moderna.