Raphael, Study of three men carrying the body of Christ, c.1506-7, pen and brown ink over black chalk with red chalk (for Christ’s body) over geometrical indications and some minimal blind stylus marks, pricked for transfer, 28.2 x 24.6 cm. Presented by a Body of Subscribers in 1846. Ashmolean Museum WA1846.173.
According to Leon Battista Alberti, the great difficulty of art consisted in representing inert death, and its contrasting state of moving life. In this considered study for the Borghese Entombment, Raphael’s thoughts were on the physical and emotional strain endured by the living in carrying Christ’s dead body. He built up the nude figures in layers, adding broad pen and ink contours and chiselled hatching over smudged black chalk, stylus indications and some leadpoint marks (seen most clearly around the right leg of the figure furthest to the left). The complementary sequence of three views of muscular exertion also shows how Raphael used drawing to absorb and appropriate Michelangelo’s treatment of the male nude in his Battle of Cascina cartoon. It reveals as well Raphael’s desire to understand the anatomical mechanics of an idea for the carrying of Christ’s body that he had mapped out in another compositional drawing (British Museum, 1855-2-14-1).
In developing this idea, the artist gave greater emphasis to the contrast between the front and back views of the two bearers, perhaps stimulated by his discovery of expressive motifs in antique sculpture. The third figure is brought into closer dialogue with the bearer on the left, complicating the problem of negotiating the step by pairing up on each level the opposite feet belonging to each man (right foot/left foot), with each pair of feet apparently going in different directions. Part of Raphael’s visual rhetoric was to extend or amplify an idea, often by introducing a type of contrapuntal rhyming of motifs. Picking up the red chalk, Raphael then lightly sketched in the dead body of Christ before deciding to transfer the design to another sheet to continue its development, as seen in the areas of pricking. The problems explored in this sheet reach formal resolution in the squared-up drawing of the main group around Christ’s body in the Uffizi (538E).
Ben Thomas, art historian
Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Prenotazione non più disponibile