FRANCESCO SALVIATI | Nude male in profile facing right, looking toward the lower left

Londres, Hugh Squire ; 
Sa vente, An interesting collection of Old Master Drawings, formed by an eminent connoisseur, Londres, Sotheby's, 28 juin 1979, n^o46 (comme Baccio Bandinelli, acquis par Pietro Scarpa) ;
Galerie Pietro Scarpa, Venise, 1979, comme Bandinelli ; 
Acquis auprès de cette galerie.

Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, L'Oeil et la Passion, Dessins italiens de la Renaissance dans le collections privées françaises, 2011, n°20, repr. (notice par Catherine Monbeig Goguel) ;
Rennes, 2012, n°3 (notice par Catherine Monbeig Goguel)

Francesco Salviati ou la Bella Maniera, cat. exp., Rome-Paris, 1998, p.107, sous n.^o14, repr.

A potent source of inspiration for figural art, both in the High Renaissance and during the subsequent period of Mannerism, was sculpture, and most of all the sculpture of classical antiquity.  In parallel with this, life drawings played a crucial role for many leading 16^th-century masters, especially in Florence. This refined and important study from life by the young Salviati is an emblematic example of such a drawing, which is testimony not only to the classical training received by the young artist, in the best Florentine tradition, but also to his extraordinary ability in the handling of the red chalk (a technique introduced by Leonardo), and his remarkable skill in manipulating the fall of light to enhance the three-dimensionality of his figure.

The attribution of the Adrien drawing to Salviati was brilliantly proposed by Catherine Monbeig Goguel in the catalogue of her outstanding exhibition devoted to the artist, held at the Villa Medici, Rome, and the Louvre in 1998 (see Literature). As Goguel pointed out, this sheet can be closely compared with another study, ‘Homme nu assis en équilibre sur une chaise Savonarole,’ now in the Louvre, ‘dessinée également d’après un garzone’, (one can wonder if it was possibly even executed from the same model)¹; that drawing, though executed in the very different technique of silverpoint and black chalk heightened with white, on prepared paper, is also considered by Goguel to be an early work by Salviati.² 

In her Rennes exhibition catalogue entry, Goguel observed that it is not surprising that the Adrien drawing was previously attributed to Baccio Bandinelli (1493-1560), a famous and influential sculptor and equally fascinating draughtsman, to whom the young Salviati was briefly apprenticed around 1526-1527. The exquisite and sensitive use of the red chalk in the present sheet, although in some ways comparable to Bandinelli’s handling of the same technique, already demonstrates that the young artist is capable of a plasticity in the rendering of the nude, and a dexterity in the variety of the short, delicate strokes that animate the figure, that surpasses the more methodical and controlled handling of the chalk typical of Bandinelli. The draped cloth, covering the support where the young model is seated, is, however, executed more broadly, in a manner more reminiscent of Andrea del Sarto’s vigorous use of the red chalk medium.  In fact, Salviati had been a pupil of del Sarto’s before leaving for Rome in 1531, to enter the service of Cardinal Giovanni Salviati, from whom he took his name;  as Goguel notes in the Rennes catalogue: ‘ Salviati se fit remarquer tout jeune pour ses dons de dessinateur, développés au contact d’Andrea del Sarto…’.

Large figure studies like this were clearly made as exercises in their own right, and can rarely be directly connected with any painting. The Adrien drawing is a rare and important example of one of Salviati’s drawings of this type, which are testimony to the artist’s early activity and training, and to his great talent and refinement, qualities that are perhaps less frequently associated with the artist’s draughtsmanship than the eccentricity and originality that characterise his mature works.

The career of Francesco Salviati, also known as Cecchino Salviati, was nurtured and transformed by his Roman period, where he was greatly influenced by the Roman works of Michelangelo and Raphael, as well as by Perino del Vaga. His earliest important commission in the Eternal City was the Visitation of 1537, which he executed in the oratorio of San Giovanni Decollato, before returning to Florence in 1539, to participate in the decorations erected for the marriage of Cosimo I de’ Medici and Eleonora di Toledo. Salviati’s commissions also took him to Venice, in the service of the Grimani family, in 1539-1541, and although Venetian artists were clearly well informed about the evolution of the Arts in central Italy and in Rome, Salviati’s arrival in Venice as an established major figure in the new phase of the ‘Bella Maniera’ constituted a very important source of artistic information and reciprocal awareness and absorption.

Salviati was also invited to France on several occasions, but did not actually go there until 1554-1555. His stay at the court of the French King François I was, however, relatively brief, as he fell out with Francesco Primaticcio (1504-1570), the leading Italian artist working there, and returned fairly rapidly to Rome. 

Salviati is one of the most important artistic personalities of High Mannerism. The complexity and grandeur of his decorations were vastly admired, and an equal brilliance is evident both in the wonderful ease of execution seen in his early drawings, such as the Adrien sheet, and in his imaginative and creative mind, which devised and created his astonishing legacy of monumental fresco decorations and extraordinary paintings.

1. Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. 10913; see C. Monbeig Goguel, exhib. cat., op. cit., 1998, p. 110, cat. no. 16, reproduced

2. Another sheet of figure studies in the same technique, attributed to Salviati by Catherine Goguel, is in the Musée de Grenoble, inv. no. MG D 2025; see: De chair et d'esprit. Dessins italiens du Musée de Grenoble, exhib. cat.Grenoble, Musée de Grenoble, 2010, cat. no. 16, reproduced p. 63