Lot 36: A male nude sleeping, seated and in profile to the right

Baldassare Franceschini, il Volterrano (Volterra 1611-1690 Florence)
A male nude sleeping, seated and in profile to the right
red chalk
14 3/8 x 9 7/8 in. (365 x 251 mm.)

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.
A Study with a few differences (especially to the right leg and to the left arm) for the winged figure of Sleep in the large fresco of Vigilance and Sleep painted in the mid 1640's on the ceiling of the Stanza della Guardia in the Villa Medicea di Castello outside Florence (fig. 1; see M. Bietti, 'La fucina artistica di Castello', in C. Acidini Luchinat and G. Galletti, Le ville e i giardini di Castello e Petraia a Firenze, Florence, 1992, pp. 41-62). It was commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici (1599-1648), younger son of Grand Duke Ferdinando I.
The subject of the fresco is an allegory adapted to the purpose of the room where, during the night, the Prince's sentries kept watch. The figure of Sleep is set on clouds as a putto holds a soporific smouldering poppy under his nose. In the upper part of the composition, Vigilance, accompanied by a heron, holds a candle while another putto clutches two poppy stems in his left hand and raises a third towards a flame on the right. A drawing for this figure is in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge (T. McGrath, 'Preparatory Drawings by Volterrano at the Fogg Art Museum', Master Drawings, XLIII, 2005, no. 4, pp. 503-5, fig. 5).
The pose of Sleep derives from that of the famous Barberini Faun (fig. 2), also called the Drunken Satyr, an antique marble discovered in Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome in 1628, now in the Glyptothek, Munich. In 1642 a print of the mutilated marble was published showing the Faun seen dal sotto in su, lying on his back. The flatness of the chest, the definition of the muscle structure and the pose of the head are directly inspired by that model. The absence of both legs and arms on the newly discovered marble might explain Volterrano's evident hesitation over how to treat them in his drawing and in the fresco. The reference to a piece of sculpture seems implicit in the drawing where the sleeping figure appears to be lying on rocks which are replaced by clouds in the fresco.