Man in Armor beside a Chariot (c. 1550): Art, History and Details

Man in Armor beside a Chariot (c. 1550) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Francesco Salviati (Italian, 1510–1563).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This drawing of a young soldier setting fire to a cart of war trophies may represent a rarely depicted legend about the Macedonian king Alexander the Great (356–323 BC), who built one of the largest empires of the ancient world by the time he was 30 years old. Because the heavy spoils of war were slowing down his troops, Alexander set fire to his own cart of goods to encourage his soldiers to do the same. Renaissance princes revered him as a brilliant military strategist. Emperor Maximilian I (reigned 1486–1519), pictured in the equestrian portrait and in the great triumphal car nearby, considered Alexander a distant ancestor.

Object facts

• Title: Man in Armor beside a Chariot
• Date: c. 1550
• Creator attribution: Francesco Salviati (Italian, 1510–1563)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash over black chalk, heightened with white
• Dimensions: Sheet: 35.7 x 27.1 cm (14 1/16 x 10 11/16 in.); Secondary Support: 35.7 x 27.4 cm (14 1/16 x 10 13/16 in.); Tertiary Support: 35.8 x 27.4 cm (14 1/8 x 10 13/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1964.99

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Olszewski, Edward J., and Jane Glaubinger. The Draftsman's Eye: Late Italian Renaissance Schools and Styles. Cleveland: Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with the Indiana University Press, 1981.
• "Year in Review for 1964." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 51, no. 10 (1964): 236-66.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.