Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Department of Drawings and Prints), accession no. 36.101.1. Not currently on view.
Location History:
The drawing entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection in 1936 through the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund.
This small sheet is shared by two figures, one an elegant, sculptural nude man at left, with his hands behind his head, and the other a seated man at right, who seems to be bending over an open book. There is no thematic connection linking the pair; it is a study sheet not a finished composition and was used to solve a practical problem. The standing nude was intended as a stepping stone to a much larger religious work, probably a Saint Sebastian or a Flagellation of Christ, the latter being more feasible for an artist like Rubens, who had numerous students. The seated reader was probably a studio assistant who was posing as an informal model and was shot for the purpose of practicing the pose of a seated figure, not for a commission. The control of the technique is remarkable, however; metalpoint is an unforgiving medium that exacts no corrections once a line has been set on the prepared surface and Filippino is able to take the technique up to the level of descriptive exactness, with touches of white gouache removing form from the pink-tinted paper beneath. The back of the sheet has two additional studies of hands, done with less confidence than the figures that appear on the front, and demonstrates the small but significant difference between the artist's more confident passages and more exploratory ones on the same sheet. The large-scale figure study is rare in Filippino's surviving drawings, and its execution dates it to his period in Lucchese (1482-83), when Filippino was also working on the Magrini altarpiece in Lucca, a modest study sheet yet that unobtrusively records the working method of the execution of a major public commission at the very same time.
This double-sided sheet by Filippino Lippi offers an intimate window into the Renaissance workshop (bottega) practice, bridging real-world observation and sacred commissions. The juxtaposition of a formal, anatomical nude (intended for a martyr figure such as St. Sebastian or Christ) alongside an informal sketch of a studio assistant reading highlights how Renaissance masters systematically used life studies to solve spatial and volumetric challenges. Executed in unforgiving metalpoint with delicate white gouache heightening, the sheet demonstrates remarkable discipline: every line demands absolute certainty. To me, the sheet represents the working mind of the artist—capturing both the rigorous, idealizing demands of monumental public religious art and the spontaneous, observed reality of daily Renaissance studio life.
