Sheet of Studies: A Seated Nude Man, A Youthful Head and a Caricature Head of a Man Playing a Pipe

Domenico Maria Canuti

about 1669–1671

Red chalk, Chalk

J. Paul Getty Museum

A red chalk drawing depicts a seated nude male figure with his arm raised to his face, and studies of two heads, one in profile and another playing a pipe. A red chalk drawing depicts a seated nude male figure with his arm raised to his face, and studies of two heads, one in profile and another playing a pipe. This seated youth or ignudo shields his face from the blinding light of Hercules' arrival on Mount Olympus. Here Domenico Maria Canuti conceived him as a real-life youth, muscular and rounded, with emotional energy implicit in his contorted pose. Soon after making this drawing, he portrayed the same ignudo somewhat differently in a corner of one of his first major works, the Apotheosis of Hercules on the ceiling of the grand salon of a palazzo in Bologna. Canuti based his drawing