Franco

No artist fueled Battista Franco’s imagination and passion for drawing as profoundly as Michelangelo. Giorgio Vasari began his Life of Franco by noting that the Venetian-born artist, a gifted draughtsman from childhood, at age 20 moved to Rome, lured by Roman disegno.^[1] There he studied the work of various contemporary masters before deciding to devote himself to copying Michelangelo with a thoroughness and zeal that Vasari found admirable. He underscores Franco’s unwavering determination to study and reproduce every work by the master within reach, which included copying the copies of others.^[2] Although Franco was not among the master’s immediate pupils or protégés, Michelangelo, and especially his work prior to the Last Judgement, remained a defining influence throughout his career.^[3] Of course, Franco looked to other artists – notably Raphael – for guidance and inspiration but none left a more enduring mark on his extensive oeuvre. Michelangelo’s impact is already unmistakable in Franco’s earliest phase of drawing. Drawings and paintings from this period – the decade c.1530-c.1540 – range from direct responses to Michelangelo’s works in painting, sculpture and drawing to original inventions in a deeply Michelangelesque manner.

This finely drawn male nude, hitherto unpublished, is a variant of Michelangelo’s Male Nude with Proportions Indicated, the recto of a double-sided sheet in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle (figs. 1, 2).^[4] It is an important addition to the twenty or so copies by Franco after Michelangelo’s surviving or documented works, a fraction of those he certainly made.^[5] But its relation to Michelangelo’s original is not straightforward.

When Franco addresses Michelangelo’s drawings in chalk, he never makes facsimiles or tries to imitate their manner. He translates Michelangelo’s models into his own idiom, changing character and expression as well as style.^[6] Here, while he reproduces the essential form, structure, and pose of Michelangelo’s nude, he makes this male nude his own: thus, the proportions are altered, and the figure stands more upright. The expansion of the torso is characteristic and recalls, for example, that of Franco’s standing Homme nu en pied, portant une cape et faisant un pas en avant in the Louvre of the late 1530s.^[7] Less interested than Michelangelo in internal tension, Franco omits the feature of the right hand reaching behind the back to brace the front of the left elbow and emphasises instead smooth – even polished – surfaces, with none of the powerfully voluptuous modelling of Michelangelo’s original. The head is also transformed: no longer the likeness of a live studio model, it appears otherworldly – part human, part grotesque – with exaggeratedly sunken cheeks, furrowed brows, and protruding eyes.

Other differences include the omission of Michelangelo’s proportional annotations and, of course, the drawing’s medium: Franco executed his nude in black chalk rather than the red of Michelangelo’s original and the other two known copies. This choice is not unexpected as Franco often made copies in a medium different from the originals.^[8] There exist at least two other instances of Franco using black chalk to reproduce drawings by Michelangelo in red.^[9] Franco’s chalk-work also differs radically from that of the original; he meticulously models the figure with a sharpened point of chalk, reminiscent of the fine pen that he loved to employ, rather than building up internal forms through broad parallel lines combined with blending with a stump. He articulates the muscles and bone structure with short, hard hatched strokes in a similar manner. The internal demarcation by sharp lines and the écorché-like subdivision of musculature, especially along the figure’s left side, are also characteristic and are seen in other drawings of the 1530s, notably his copies after Michelangelo’s Times of Day.

Franco’s sheet is considerably larger than Michelangelo’s and the figure, before the drawing was trimmed at the lower edge, would have been taller by about a third. This implies that Franco’s copy was based not directly on the Windsor drawing or on a facsimile of it – such as that in in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem – but on a larger, freer, intermediary copy.^[10] Maybe this was a second red chalk copy, once owned by Thomas Banks, RA (1735-1805) and later Sir Edward Poynter (1936-1919), who sold it in 1918.^[11] Described as ‘larger, and carried further in finish and modeling’, that drawing certainly corresponds more closely to the Franco sheet in scale.

But Franco probably more likely knew Michelangelo’s study via another intermediary: his slightly older colleague and friend, Raffaello da Montelupo (c.1505-1566) who collaborated with Michelangelo in the final stages of work on the New Sacristy, copied – loosely rather than pedantically – some of his master’s drawings.  And Raffaello was not afraid to play his own variations on them with a freedom that Franco would have appreciated. Strong evidence that Raffaello da Montelupo shared drawings is seen in the powerful influence his drawing style exercised on that of his younger friend.^[12] Franco could also have gained direct access to at least some of Michelangelo’s drawings – and  certainly copies after them – through his exact contemporary Bartolomeo Ammanati (1511-1592), another early associate in Rome and in Florence, where they shared lodgings – for Ammanati had briefly possessed a number of drawings that he had stolen from Michelangelo’s studio.^[13]

The present drawing was likely executed during Franco’s period of intense study of Michelangelo’s work, in the mid-1530s the period of his closest connection with Montelupo and Ammanati. The figure’s smooth, almost slick finish suggests engagement with polished sculpture and invites comparison with Franco’s Night in the Louvre (fig. 3), one of six copies of Michelangelo’s Times of Day made after the marble originals in Florence around 1536.^[14] According to Vasari, joining Ammanati in frequent visits to the New Sacristy in San Lorenzo: ‘Battista set himself to draw with the greatest industry the statues of Michelagnolo that are in the new Sacristy of S. Lorenzo, to which at that time all the painters and sculptors of Florence had flocked to draw and to work in relief […] Battista formed a friendship with the sculptor Bartolommeo Ammanati, who was studying the works of Buonarroti there in the company with many others.’^[15]

The drawing’s lambent surface also suggests familiarity with drawings and paintings by Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) as well as the sculpture of Niccolò Tribolo (1497-1550), both active in Florence at the time. Tribolo was probably the first to produce highly finished reductions of the New Sacristy’s sculptures, and Franco no doubt knew, them especially since Tribolo too collaborated on the festival apparati for Charles V’s 1536 entry into Florence and Alessandro de’ Medici’s marriage to Margaret of Austria. Bronzino, Tribolo and Franco again collaborated in 1539 on the decorations for Cosimo de’ Medici’s wedding to Eleanora of Toledo.^[16]

The refined treatment of the body contrasts with that of the facial features summarily described with looping, scroll-like contours. This tendency to exaggerate is typical of Franco’s pen studies from this early period, such as Two Male Nudes Seen from the Front and Side, with a Separate Study of the Head of the Complete Figure (recto); Seated Male Nude Leaning on a Table (verso) on the New York art market in 2017 (fig. 4).^[17] The prominently articulated finger joints of the left hand, together with their long and tapered forms, are likewise characteristic of Franco’s early pen work. The neck, with its protruding sternocleidomastoid muscles and sharply defined Adam’s apple, appears to be part surface anatomy and part anatomical dissection. Together, these elements suggest the influence of Michelangelo’s semi-caricatural pen drawings of the 1520s, while also anticipating the anatomy of several figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement fresco, notably St. John the Baptist at left and the skeletons donning muscles and flesh at the lower register.

Franco’s had a keen and lifelong interest in anatomy.^[18] Vasari noted that the artist gave ‘his attention to executing well and with a good knowledge of muscles a torso, an arm, a leg, or other member, believing that a good grasp of that part is the whole secret’ and that he ‘had wasted time beyond all reason over the minutiae of muscles and over drawing with too great diligence, while paying no attention to the other fields of art.’^[19] These comments were made in reference to Franco’s Arrest of St. John the Baptist frescoed on the left wall of the Oratory of S. Giovanni Decollato in Rome around 1543(fig. 5). This interest is further reflected in a group of finely drawn pen studies, probably inspired by Michelangelo own – best classed as écorchés – from the early 1540s, as well as thirteen carefully rendered pen drawings of skeletons, torsos, skulls and bones (fig. 6).^[20] Delicately executed in pen and ink with tightly woven meshes of line, these studies appeared to have served as model drawings for a monumental print that Franco planned but probably did not realise.^[21]

We can only hypothesize as to the purpose and function of the present nude. Vasari reports that Franco assisted Raffaello on the schemes devised for the triumphal celebrations accompanying the entry of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V into Rome and Florence in 1536 and 1539 encourage us to suggest that the drawing was made in connection with one of those projects, perhaps for a simulated statue to be painted in grisaille. According to Vasari, Franco’s first paintings were four large chiaroscuro scenes from Roman history on the Porta S. Sebastiano, part of the ephemeral scheme for Charles V’s arrival in Rome in 1536; and he assisted Montelupo with ten stucco statues on the Ponte S. Angelo.^[22] Franco must have also been responsible for painting the grisaille scenes surrounding the arch-shaped window to the left of the Arrest fresco.^[23] Indeed some of the figure types are similar in stance and demeanor to the present nude.

On the verso of the present sheet are two separate head studies drawn in outline. At centre is a boy with head band and curls, facing forward, turned to the right. The expression is sweet and the facial type Michelangelesque. Softly drawn in black chalk the face shows a sensitivity to flesh not normally associated with Franco. The features are similar, in reverse, to those of the shepherd boy carrying a bundled lamb at the right of the Arrest fresco (fig. 7).^[24] Three recently published cartoon fragments relating to the fresco – including the shepherd boy and the woman in front of him, a further female head, and a third of hands and a male profile head – are in the Uffizi.^[25] The stylus indications suggest the boy’s head on the present sheet was traced to another support before presumably being developed further.^[26] Although the head comes close to the one in that scene, it might have been intended for some other picture, such as a Holy Family or a Madonna, given the sweetness of the child’s face. The second head on the present verso at lower right, is a lightly drawn left profile showing only a nose, forehead, and eye. This may represent an early idea for the figure below the boy in the cartoon – shifted to the right in the final fresco – or an exploration for another head entirely; it has a rather caricatural cast.

One of the most striking copies after Michelangelo in Battista Franco’s oeuvre, the present sheet adds to our understanding of his reception in the 1530s. Michelangelo’s Windsor recto and verso and other drawings of about the same period, c. 1516, are connected with the marble statues of standing Slaves intended for the tomb for Pope Julius II. Tragically for Michelangelo, that grand project was not completed until 1545 and then in a radically truncated form that excluded the Slaves in which Michelangelo had invested so much time and emotion.^[27] One of the other related red chalk drawings in the Louvre was copied and used by Francesco Primaticcio (1504-1570) for his pendentive of L’Été painted in the Salle de Bal at Fontainebleau in the mid-1550s; it circulated before it left Italy for France for it was copied, still at full-length, by a Florentine hand.^[28] Another copy attributed to Toussaint Debreuil (1561-1602) by Dominique Cordellier, now with Poncelin de Raucourt Fine Arts, Paris, is based on a further drawing by Michelangelo for the project now lost.^[29] Together with the Franco drawing presented here, these drawings significantly deepen our appreciation of the appeal of Michelangelo’s mid-1510s nude studies associated with the Julius Tomb Prigioni, a moment of particular beauty in his graphic progression.

Anne Varick Lauder and Paul Joannides

*The authors wish to thank the following for their assistance in the preparation of this entry :

Martin Clayton, Giada Damen, Terry van Druten, Monique Kornell, Grant Lewis, Laurie and Emmanuel Marty de Cambiaire and Diederick Poncelin de Raucourt.