Giovanni Battista Naldini

This double sided sheet was most certainly once part of an album, now dismantled. Stylistically it can be closely associated to several drawings now pasted into an album in the Biblioteca Comunale di Siena, which can be confidently attributed to Giovanni Battista Naldini.¹  In the 19th century those drawings were, however, believed to be the work of Michelangelo, as some of the studies on the versos are copies after his sculptures.

Like some of the sheets in the Biblioteca Comunale, which probably originated from a sketchbook in the collection of a Sienese artist or from the Cibo Malaspina family, this drawing combines the compositional study on the recto with studies after sculptures on the verso. Whether, though, the torso of Venus that we see here on the verso was studied after the Antique or from a cast is hard to determine, as the figure is of a very standard type, and even if it was an original classical sculpture, it is very likely to have been restored into a full statue since Naldini made his drawings, making a positive identification virtually impossible.

^1. M. Ciampolini, Drawing in Renaissance and Baroque Siena: 16th- and 17th- Century Drawings from Sienese Collections, exh. cat., Athens, Georgia, Museum of Art, 2002, pp. 24-25, figs. 6-7