Silenus drinking from a great vase held above his head

A new addition to Cambiaso’s earliest corpus of drawings, this vigorous design for a drinking figure relates to a well-known drawing in the Princeton University Art Museum, often referred to as Silenus drinking (inv. 1948.627; see J. Bober in Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, ed. L. Giles, Princeton, 2014, no. 18 and J. Bober in Luca Cambiaso 1527-1585, exh. cat. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, and Genoa, Palazzo Ducale, 2006, no. 9). In both drawings the same figure appears powerfully foreshortened, its sprawling muscularity almost compressed: 'the face lost behind the urn, the trunk slipping toward the viewer, the lower leg collapsing under the weight, the Silenus is also unique in turning both stylish references and shortcomings toward aptly humorous effects' (Bober, op. cit., 2006, p. 228). The sheet in Princeton has been associated with Cambiaso’s frescoes for the façade of Palazzo Sivoli, Genoa, one of the artist earliest decorative endeavors, completed around 1547. The frescoes are now destroyed but extensively described in Raffaele Soprani’s biography of the artist (1768) as representing 'sea monsters with fantastic tritons, the other rendering a Galatea accompanied by putti and [figures] of rivers spilling water from their urns' (Vite de' pittori, scultori, ed architetti genovesi, I, p. 79). Possibly executed for a vertical decorative inset, the present drawing could well have been part of the iconographic program of the Sivoli façade.