Study of a Standing Female Nude Seen from Behind for 'The Golden Age'

Author: Albert Elen

This drawing was originally attributed to Giorgione (1473/1474-1510) and his school, but was eventually identified by Tietze/Tietze-Conrat (1944) as a preliminary study for the nude woman with a flower basket seen from behind on the right in the composition of The Golden Age. That painting was then in H. Acton’s collection in Florence and was regarded as a work by an anonymous artist. The Tietzes ascribed the drawing and the painting to an unknown Flemish artist working in Venice in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, and pointed to similarities to sculptures by Giambologna (1529-1608), probably referring chiefly to the 1573 marble Venere della grotticella in the Boboli Gardens in Florence.^[1] A black-and-white photograph of the painting was taken in the Fototeca Zeri by Federico Zeri in November 1956, with an attribution to Pauwels Franck.

The drawing was published by Meijer (1975) in relation to the painting as the work of Fiammingo, and this attribution has since been universally accepted. It emerged that the artist painted the same composition, albeit of a poorer standard, as part of a series of twelve large paintings depicting The Four Ages of the World (c.1580-92), commissioned by the wealthy German banking family, the Fuggers, for their recently built summer residence near Kirchheim an der Mindl in Bavaria.^[2] This painting is still in situ, whereas many of the others in the series have been dispersed through sales.

Paolo Fiammingo was an originally Flemish artist, enrolled as Pauwels Franck as a master in the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp in 1561. From the start of the 1570s until his death he worked in Venice, first as an assistant in the workshop of Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594), and later independently. His most important client was the Fugger family, for whom he and his workshop painted a total of thirty-two works.^[3] He was known primarily for his painted allegorical scenes in lush landscapes, a personal specialism he had brought with him from the Flemish tradition. He sometimes also painted such landscape backgrounds for Tintoretto and other local artists. For the time being, by contrast, his graphic oeuvre remains just fourteen surviving drawings.^[4]

Whistler (2014) suggested that the Rotterdam drawing, although the pose was clearly inspired by a sculptural example by Giambologna, was made from a life model, pointing to pentimenti in the figure’s outlines. These are so trivial, however, that her hypothesis appears unjustified. It would also be the only drawing using this working method we know of by the artist.^[5]