Скачать или смотреть Michaelangelo's First Nude Drawing | Christie's Inc

This unpublished drawing, one of the most exciting discoveries made in the field of Old Master Drawings in recent decades, is an important addition to a small group of drawings by Michelangelo from the 1490s, copied from works by earlier Florentine masters. ‘He drew for many months from the pictures of Masaccio in the Carmine,’ Giorgio Vasari wrote in his 1568 life of Michelangelo, referring to the paintings by the early fifteenth-century painter Masaccio (1401-1428) in Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence’s Oltrarno quarter, ‘where he copied those works with so much judgment, that the craftsmen and all other men were astonished, in such sort that envy grew against him together with his fame.’ Vasari’s statement is confirmed by two further, wellknown studies of similarly impressive size after Masaccio’s frescoes in the church, either after the celebrated but lost painting depicting the monastery’s consecration, or those still visible in the Brancacci chapel from 1425-1427, nicknamed by Bernard Berenson the ‘Sistine chapel of the early Renaissance’: a drawing in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich (inv. 2191), and a double-sided sheet at the Albertina, Vienna (inv. 116). These drawings can be dated to the time when Michelangelo enjoyed the protection of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and later of his son Piero de’ Medici, who encouraged the young artist’s study of antique sculpture and early Renaissance art in the years immediately preceding the creation of some of his most famous works, such as the Pietà in Saint Peter’s, Rome (1498-1499), and the marble David in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (1501-1504). An earlier drawing, possibly datable to the early 1490s, is a copy after a fresco at Santa Croce by another foundational force in early Italian painting, Giotto (1266/1276-1337), and is at the Musée du Louvre (inv. 706). The pen technique of all of the drawings mentioned is strongly indebted to that of Michelangelo’s first teacher, Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494), with whom he studied in the years around 1490.