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FocusOnRaphael

Raphael, Study of two male nudes, c. 1519, black chalk with white heightening with traces of blind stylus, 25.7 x 36.3cm. Presented by a Body of Subscribers in 1846, Ashmolean Museum, WA1846.210.

 

Working from a model, Raphael at first drew rapidly with the stylus: his barely visible indented lines describe the curve of the base of the back or the outlines of flexing muscles along the right side of the torso of the figure to the left. The strained pose – seated but with right leg raised, so that the knee is parallel with the shoulder – required the artist to work with concentrated speed, testing his concept for the pose against reality, and capturing its effect on a living body. Changing to black chalk, Raphael consolidated the forms of the body with lightly applied touches that became more emphatic contours, for example with the revisions that clarify the outlines of the right shoulder. His handling was partly reflexive, drawing the ear and profile of the face with an assurance based on the tactile memory of innumerable similar studies. Increasingly, however, Raphael focused in on the details of this particular back – mapping the swelling ridges thrown up by the exertion of holding the pose with rubbed chalk, passages of regular hatching that rotate with the motion of the muscles and white heightening to emphasise the fall of light. The model then lapsing into a more relaxed attitude, Raphael made a second drawing (which overlaps a line drawn bisecting the leg at the knee in the first study) of his shoulders and stretching right arm, enhancing its effect by framing it with dark external shading.

Raphael made this drawing as part of the design process for the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, frescoed after his death by Giulio Romano in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican. The grand visual rhetoric of this complex battle scene owes something to Raphael’s imitation of the reliefs on Trajan’s Column, but it derives its energy from life studies like the two on this sheet. The taut back muscles recorded in this drawing can be discovered in a detail to the right of the fresco of soldiers struggling to board a boat: one individual fight for survival in the midst of a conflict of cosmic significance. Poignantly, what is peripheral in the painting, occupies the artist’s full attention in the drawing.

Ben Thomas, Art historian

Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

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