Jacopo Robusti, called Jacopo Tintoretto Venice 1518 - 1594

This double-sided sheet belongs to a group of studies which Tintoretto drew after Michelangelo's small sculpture of Samson fighting the Philistines. Eight other drawings by the Tintoretto of this subject are known; six are in museums in Bayonne, Berlin, Besançon, Cambridge Mass (Fogg Art Museum), London (Courtauld Institute), Oxford (Christ Church), one was formerly in the Koenigs Collection, Rotterdam (see P. Rossi, I disegni di Jacopo Tintoretto, Florence 1975, figs. 23-35), and the last is in a New York private collection (see W. Griswold and L. Wolk-Simon, Sixteenth-Century Italian Drawings in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum, 1994, cat. no. 116). 

The drawings, all of which are executed in black and white chalk on blue paper, record the sculpture from different angles. Several are double-sided, although these tend, as here, to show the same view of the sculpture on each side of the paper.  Two of the group (the drawings formerly in the Koenigs collection and in a New York private collection) represent the sculpture from almost exactly the same angle as we see here.  Only the present sheet, however, incorporates a landscape, which appears to be unique in Tintoretto's draughtsmanship. 

The sculpture was designed by Michelangelo in 1529-30 for Piazza della Signoria, Florence, but never executed. According to Carlo Ridolfi's biography of Tintoretto, the Venetian artist was given small versions of Michelangelo's Medici Chapel sculptures by Daniele da Volterra, Michelangelo's assistant.  Included in this group may have been the replica of the Samson fighting the Philistines which Tintoretto studied (one such small replica was exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, The Genius of the Sculptor in Michelangelo's Work, 1992, cat. no. 72).  Tintoretto also made other drawn copies of Michelangelo's sculpted work in the same technique, including representations of the Head of Giuliano de'Medici, Day and Dusk.