Currently not on view
Male Torso in Armor Seen from the Rear: Study for Soffit Decoration in San Giovanni Evangelista,
ca. 1522–24
After Leonardo da Vinci, Parmigianino was probably the most accomplished and prolific of all sixteenth-century Italian draftsmen. His work has been collected enthusiastically since his lifetime, and more than one thousand of his drawings are preserved today. The four examples in Princeton’s collection illustrate the variety of media that Parmigianino employed during his short career, spent primarily in his native Parma and in Rome, exploring and perfecting his imaginative and increasingly elegant conception of the human figure.
This vibrantly colored sheet belongs to a large group of Italian drawings given to the Museum by Frank Jewett Mather Jr. in the 1940s. Despite the handwritten attribution to “Parmeggiano” by the celebrated eighteenth-century collector Jonathan Richardson Sr. (whose stamp appears in the lower left), the drawing was only recently connected with one of the artist’s earliest fresco projects, in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma. Inspired by antiquity, this animated and armored male torso is a preliminary study for one of the fictive sculptures embedded in a portion of the ornamental decoration near a fresco of the soldier saint Vitalis. Some of the white heightening may have been enhanced by a later hand.
Information
ca. 1522–24
- Frits Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins & d'estampes: marques estampillées et écrites de collections particulières et publiques: marques de marchands, de monteurs et d'imprimeurs: cachets de vente d'artistes décédés: marques de graveurs apposées après le tirage des planches : timbres d'édition, etc., (Amsterdam: Vereenigde drukkerijen; La Haye: Nijhoff, 1921)., Lugt no. 3561
- Laura Giles, Lia Markey, Claire Van Cleave, et. al., Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2014)., p. 44, cat. no. 17; p. 45 (illus.); p. 46 (verso illus.); p. 257-258, app. no. 86; p. 258 (illus.)
