Seated Male Nude (c. 1516–20): Art, History and Details

Seated Male Nude (c. 1516–20) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Baccio Bandinelli (Italian, 1493–1560).

The work and its context

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

Both Baccio Bandinelli and Michelangelo made figure drawing the foundation of their artistic and inventive processes. In this drawing, Bandinelli reimagined one of Michelangelo’s ignudi, the athletic male nudes that decorate the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Probably drawing from a live model, Bandinelli combined controlled, defined lines and smudges to create a massively muscled form, that, like Michelangelo’s figures, refers to ancient sculpture as well as to knowledge of anatomy. His use of red chalk—Michelangelo’s preferred medium for sketching the ignudi—suggests that he sought to compare his own prowess in the medium to that of the better-known master.

Object facts

• Title: Seated Male Nude
• Date: c. 1516–20
• Creator attribution: Baccio Bandinelli (Italian, 1493–1560)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: red chalk
• Dimensions: Sheet: 40 x 23.7 cm (15 3/4 x 9 5/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1998.6

A detail from the museum

Bandinelli's drawing of a moody nude combines his knowledge of ancient sculpture and paintings by Michelangelo with observation from life.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Ward, Roger. Baccio Bandinelli as a Draughtsman. Ph.D Dissertation, University of London, 1982.
• Ward, Roger, "Observations on the Red Chalk Figure Studies of Baccio Bandinelli: Two Examples in Melbourne," Art Bulletin of Victoria No. 23 (1982): pp. 19-37
• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Painting by 18th-century Italian Master Gaetano Gandolfi among Works Added to CMA Collection,” March 24, 1998, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.

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.