Circle of Agnolo Bronzino

The drawing bears an old, sixteenth-century inscription attributing it to Daniele da Volterra, under which name it hitherto has been placed. The style of the sheet, however, is more Florentine than Roman and the names of the young Alessandro Allori (1535-1607) or of some other unnamed “follower of Bronzino” have been proposed (Philippe Costamagna, 1997, and Paul Joannides, 1996). The delicate draftsmanship and inventive, exaggerated, Pontormesque pose suggest an artist close to Bronzino. The pose recurs similarly in the figure of a bearded man at the far left in Bronzino’s painting of Christ in Limbo, dated 1552, and executed for the chapel of Givoanni Zanchini in the church of Santa Croce, Florence (Tazartes 2003, 55).

The baldness of the figure, the inorganic way it is seated on a box or slab, the unforgiving firmness of the flesh of the thighs and buttock, suggest that the artist may have used an artist’s doll, a mannequin, rather than a live studio assistant as a model for the drawing. The landscape of the back derives from that of the Torso Belvedere (Bober and Rubinstein, 132), which served as inspiration for several of Bronzino’s works, such as the Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (ca. 1539-40) and the Portrait of Giovanni de’ Medici as John the Baptist in the Galleria Borghese, Rome, of ca. 1560-61. The figure also recalls the painting of St. John the Baptist at the J. Paul Getty Museum of ca. 1543-545 (repr. Tazartes 2003, 139).