A study for a "Prisoner" after a design by Michelangelo for the tomb of Pope Julius II, inscribed „Tibaldi, Ecole florentine“ at right margin, pen and brown ink, on paper, 26 x 8.4 cm, laid down on tissue paper , browned, stained, mounted, unframed, (Sch)

The drawing has been cut down considerably on all sides. The attribution of the present drawing has not yet been sufficiently clarified. Paul Joannides remarks that the drawing is a same-size copy after a preliminary drawing for one of the "Prisoners" at the tomb of Pope Julius II. Another drawing by Michelangelo with a similar figure is preserved in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (P II, no. 297). The original came to France with Antonio Mini in 1532 but it was the torso alone that Primaticchio quoted in the mid-1550s in his design for the pendentive of L'Été in the Salle de Bal at Fontainebleau. It is likely therefore that the truncation took place before Primaticchio's design, perhaps to preserve a fragment from a damaged sheet. The copy after the drawing from France could also be datable to the 1550s. The draftsman could have been responsible for a number of copies of lost or surviving drawings by Michelangelo. Our sheet differs, however, from those so far identified that it is no pen copy of a pen original but a pen interpretation of a red chalk drawing. Literature: Paul Joannides, Michelange, Ecole, Copistes, Inventaire des Dessin italiens, Musee du Louvre, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris 2003; A letter by the same author, in: Master Drawings Volume XLIV/ Number 3/ 2006, no. 20, p.372, Ill.