Giovanni Battista NALDINI

This superb drawing represents the river god of the Arno, accompanied by the lion that was the heraldic symbol of Florence. It was common practice in the 16th century to illustrate the Arno as a river god with an attendant lion, as can be seen in several frescoes in the various rooms of the Palazzo Vecchio executed by Vasari and his assistants. 

The Naldini scholar Virginia Graziani has dated the present sheet to the middle or late 1560s, after the artist’s trip to Rome and at the start of his independent career in Florence. A related and closely comparable red chalk drawing of a river god and lion – essentially the same composition seen from a slightly different angle – appears on the recto of a double-sided drawing by Naldini formerly in the collection of Ian Woodner and with Colnaghi in 1994, which is today in a private collection. As Rick Scorza has noted of the ex-Woodner drawing, the other side of which is a copy in black chalk after a figure from Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, in terms equally applicable to the present sheet, ‘drawing directly from observation, Naldini produced a faithful but also dynamic copy of Michelangelo's Last Judgement. Obviously, in the act of copying, an artist suppresses his own creativity. Turning Naldini's sheet over, however, we see how the creative side of his personality literally explodes in his representation of the River Arno. This drawing clearly demonstrates [Vincenzo] Borghini's opinion that only by recognizing ‘Michelangelo's drawing, relief, grace and liveliness’ can one trace ‘the strength, the grace, the dexterity, the ease, the gentleness, the sound, the nerve, the spirit of that man’’.

Other stylistically comparable drawings by Naldini include a red chalk copy after Michelangelo’s sculpture of Victory, on the verso of a double-sided sheet formerly in the collection of Pierre de Charmant in Geneva and sold at auction in 2002, and a study of a male nude leaning forward in the Uffizi. Also somewhat comparable is a study of a crouching male nude, likewise in the Uffizi, while a similar study of a lion is found in a red chalk drawing of a lion attacking a horse, after Giambologna, which appeared at auction in New York in 1999.

The drawing of a standing draped figure holding a book and supported by two putti, on the verso of the present sheet, is an early work by Naldini, done during his stay in Rome in 1560-1561, when he made numerous copies of the work of earlier artists. As has kindly been pointed out by Virginia Graziani and Lorenzo D’Amici, the verso drawing is in fact a copy of a figure of a sibyl from a lost monochrome fresco by Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino da Firenze painted on the façade of the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. The now-lost façade decoration of San Pietro in Vincoli, which depicted scenes from the life of Saint Peter accompanied by prophets and sibyls, is known only through a handful of later drawn copies by anonymous artists. Two such copy drawings, one in Biblioteca Comunale in Siena and the other in the Uffizi in Florence, show the same standing sibyl, holding up a book and flanked by two putti. Naldini is known to have produced a number of copies of works by Polidoro and Maturino. Graziani has further likened the verso, in stylistic terms, to other early Roman-period drawings by Naldini, in the British Museum and the Uffizi.

The first recorded owner of this drawing was the 19th century Florentine nobleman and collector Count Raffaello Ettore Lamponi Leopardi, whose collection of paintings and drawings was dispersed at auction in Milan in 1902.