Lot 59: GIOVAN BATTISTA NALDINI (attr.) The Supper at Emmaus

GIOVAN BATTISTA NALDINI (attr.)
The Supper at Emmaus
Red pencil on paper squared in black pencil

This composition, with its outstanding formal balance, is a study after an altarpiece depicting the Supper at Emmaus which Santi di Tito painted for Santa Croce in Florence. Naldini focuses on the main group in the altarpiece, where Santi di Tito had placed several other decorative figures around the three figures of Christ and the apostles under a spatious vaulted and columned portico. The group that Naldini has isolated is noteworthy for its original three-quarter view of the scene, a viewpoint which manages to impart a more dynamic air to the group than is to be found in more traditional full-face representations of the Supper at Emmaus. The rapid, sketchy handling of the drapery and the faces with their straight noses and barely outlined features closely reflect the style of Giovan Battista Naldini who, although he only worked up until the 1590s, often appears in his drawings to herald the Baroque. The figure on the left is remarkably similar to a study of a man seated on a chair and to various studies of hands now in the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe in the Uffizi (inv. 857F), while the taut pencil strokes offset by an outstanding and typically Florentine formal balance are to be found in a study of a nude in red pencil also in the Uffizi's Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe (inv. 17808F; in this connection see Renaissance drawings from The Uffizi, exhibition catalogue edited by Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, Sidney 1995; pp. 130–5. notes 56, 58).
173 x 190 mm

173 x 190 mm

Red pencil on paper squared in black pencil