Lot Essay
The different sources of the subjects on the recto and verso of this sheet demonstrate the two important ways in which Degas acquired the essentials of an artist's classical education during his stay in Italy from 1856 to 1859. The recto is an académie, a nude study, which, as was mentioned in preceding notes, Degas drew while attending the life sessions at the French Academy in the Villa Medici. The verso is no less significant in recording the lessons of the powerful artistic traditions Degas found everywhere around him: from the moment Degas first arrived in Rome he drew copies of Old Master works in the Vatican museums and local churches.
The source of the nude studies on the verso is Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving The Climbers, which was based on Michelangelo's lost cartoon for the Battle of Cascina, a fresco which was never executed. Marcantonio was the most influential engraver of the 16th century. His new sculptural style of engraving, which he learned by copying Dürer's technique, attracted the interest of Raphäel, who gave him nearly 200 drawings to engrave. Marcantonio worked exclusively from drawings, often completing the images himself and adding landscape elements from other artists to produce fully finished pictures.
Marcantonio probably made drawings of Michelangelo's great cartoon in 1509 when it was displayed in the Palazzo della Signorina, Florence. He isolated three figures from the left side of the composition and carefully reproduced Michelangelo's heroic conception of the human form and its anatomy. Marcantonio set the figures in a landscape that he borrowed from Dutch engraver Lucas van Leyden's Mohammed and the Monk.
Degas included The Climbers among a series of engravings by Marcantonio which he listed alongside a sketch of a Descent from the Cross in one of his Italian notebooks (see T. Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas, New York, 1985 [rev. ed.], no. Nb8, p. 71). In the present work Degas copies all three of the nudes in Marcantonio's engraving. In another drawing he repeated the left-hand figure and combined it with a male nude taken from another Marcantonio engraving, Man with a Banner (Atelier Degas, Fourth Sale, lot 84b; coll. The Detroit Institute of Arts, John S. Newberry Bequest).
The appeal of these examples to Degas reveals the serious course of study which the young artist had set for himself. In his own efforts at life drawing he was seeking to understand the muscular power and underlying dynamics of the human body. His early mastery of this discipline derived from his own observations in life sessions as well as from the lessons of the old masters in whose works he immersed himself during his stay in Italy.
The source of the nude studies on the verso is Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving The Climbers, which was based on Michelangelo's lost cartoon for the Battle of Cascina, a fresco which was never executed. Marcantonio was the most influential engraver of the 16th century. His new sculptural style of engraving, which he learned by copying Dürer's technique, attracted the interest of Raphäel, who gave him nearly 200 drawings to engrave. Marcantonio worked exclusively from drawings, often completing the images himself and adding landscape elements from other artists to produce fully finished pictures.
Marcantonio probably made drawings of Michelangelo's great cartoon in 1509 when it was displayed in the Palazzo della Signorina, Florence. He isolated three figures from the left side of the composition and carefully reproduced Michelangelo's heroic conception of the human form and its anatomy. Marcantonio set the figures in a landscape that he borrowed from Dutch engraver Lucas van Leyden's Mohammed and the Monk.
Degas included The Climbers among a series of engravings by Marcantonio which he listed alongside a sketch of a Descent from the Cross in one of his Italian notebooks (see T. Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas, New York, 1985 [rev. ed.], no. Nb8, p. 71). In the present work Degas copies all three of the nudes in Marcantonio's engraving. In another drawing he repeated the left-hand figure and combined it with a male nude taken from another Marcantonio engraving, Man with a Banner (Atelier Degas, Fourth Sale, lot 84b; coll. The Detroit Institute of Arts, John S. Newberry Bequest).
The appeal of these examples to Degas reveals the serious course of study which the young artist had set for himself. In his own efforts at life drawing he was seeking to understand the muscular power and underlying dynamics of the human body. His early mastery of this discipline derived from his own observations in life sessions as well as from the lessons of the old masters in whose works he immersed himself during his stay in Italy.