+ Expand

Provenance: J.P. Zoomer (L.1511);
A. Normand (L.153c);
sale, New York, Christie's, 30 January 1997, lot 9

+ Expand

Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Aubry, Dessins français et italiens du XVIe et du XVIIe siècle, no. 6, reproduced

+ Expand

Literature: Roger Ward, Baccio Bandinelli as a Draughtsman, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, Courtauld Institute of Art, London 1982, no. 375;
Roger Ward, Baccio Bandinelli, Drawings from British Collections, exhib. cat., Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, 1988, under no. 28 and p. 177

+ Expand

Notes: Roger Ward compared the pose of this male nude with the very similar figure of Christ in Bandinelli's drawing The Flagellation now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (see Literature, 1988). That composition is loosely based on Michelangelo's studies of 1516 made for Sebastiano del Piombo for his fresco in San Pietro in Montorio, Rome. The present study is dated by Ward to the same moment as the Ashmolean drawing which is associated with a lost relief datable to 1532. Drawings such as the present one, where the figure is set in a landscape, are quite rare.

The subject is not definitely St. Sebastian, but could perhaps instead represent Achior from The Book of Judith whom the Assyrian warlord Holophernes had tied to a tree outside the city of Bethulia.