Rear View of Seated Man (late 1600s?): Art, History and Details

Rear View of Seated Man (late 1600s?) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Carlo Vimercati (Italian, 1660–1715).

The work and its context

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

By the late 1600s, painters of religious subjects, such as Carlo Vimercati, sought to make the content of their church decorations more accessible to a general congregation through the use of dramatic gestures and observed naturalistic details. Such artists often relied on figure studies like this drawing of a posed studio assistant to capture the dress and physique of everyday people and thus imbue their paintings with realistic elements.

Object facts

• Title: Rear View of Seated Man
• Date: late 1600s?
• Creator attribution: Carlo Vimercati (Italian, 1660–1715)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: red chalk heightened with white chalk
• Dimensions: Sheet: 27.8 x 17.8 cm (10 15/16 x 7 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1963.72

A detail from the museum

Red chalk was a common medium used by artists of the 1600s to make drawings from live models.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Leopold Blumka

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.