This is a very typical study from the model by Maso Finiguerra, a prolific draughtsman who trained as a goldsmith and is celebrated as a maker of nielli.¹ Drawings such as the present one, probably drawn from a ‘garzone’ in the studio, must have been mad💃e both as exercises to study the human body, and in order to create a repertoire of figural ideas which could be reused in multi-figured compositional drawings, made in turn in preparation for finished works.

The two main holdings of Maso Finiguerra’s drawings are in the Uffizi, and in the Louvre. The former group most probably came from fourteen albums bequeathed by Maso to a member of his family and later in the collection of Leopoldo de’ Medici, while the Louvre has the ‘album Bonnat’, a small volume containing twenty-three drawings by the artist.² That album seems to be one and the same as a volume of forty-six drawings attributed to Antonio Pollaiolo which was stolen from the Uffizi on 17 August 1793, and subsequently entered the collection of Lèon Bonnat.³ It is interesting to note that the draw☂ings by Maso in 🍨the Uffizi were long held there under the name of ‘scuola di Antonio del Pollaiolo’. 

Dr. Lorenza Melli, in an email to the present owner, has confirmed the attribution of this sheet to Maso Finiguerra on the basis of a digital image, and has suggested close stylistic similarities with the drawings formerly in the Bonnat collection, which she dates to the final phase of the artist’s career, from 1459 onwards.⁴ Like the drawings in that album, the present sheet is characterised by strong pen and ink contours over black chalk underdrawing, worked up with soft, light brown wash. Finiguerra has a very individual way of drawing both hands and feet, and in this regard the present study is particularly comparable with a seated nude in the Louvre, one of the drawings in the Bonnat album.⁵

An artist’s stock of drawings, such as the body of works by Maso preserved in the Uffizi and the Louvre, demonstrates the importance of the intellectual capital of images within the Renaissance bottega, capital that🎃 passed down to the family or pupils of the artist so as to perpetuate successful ideas, and provide the reassurance of stylistic continuity. Drawings such ♍as this study therefore constituted the most important legacy of an artist, and their preservation was of utmost importance.

1. Nielli are engraved compositions on silver in which the incised lines are filled with a black substance known as niello.

2. See L. Melli, Maso Finiguerra. I disegni, Florence 1995, pp. 27-55

3. Ibid., p. 43

4. Email dated 13 March 2014

5. Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. RF 5333; Melli, op. cit., p. 172, fig. 122