Attributed to Jacopo Robusti, called Jacopo Tintoretto

A prominent brown stain at the upper part of the sheet, and some water-type staining at the lower left corner. There are some isolated, small fox marks. The verso has some discolouration around the edges, presumably from where it was previously laid down. The chalk on the recto is still reasonably strong.
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This is one of over thirty known studies by Tintoretto and his studio after a bozzetto of Michelangelo's unexecuted sculpture Samson and the Philistines, designed circa 1530 for the Piazza della Signoria, Florence as a pendant to David.  Although Michelangelo's model does not survive, the sculpture is known from a small group of bronze reproductions.  Carlo Ridolfi's biography of Tintoretto states that the artist was given small versions of Michelangelo's Medici Chapel sculptures by Daniele da Volterra, Michelangelo's assistant.  It would have been such a replica, or else a clay bozzetto, that Tintoretto used to study.

The sheer number of the drawings, their repetitious nature and variations in quality means that deciding which are autograph has proved to be 'a notorious challenge of connoiseurship'.¹  Of the twenty-two studies identified by the Tietzes, ten are given to the master himself and twelve to his workshop.²  Rossi is even more cautious, accepting only seven as Tintoretto and one as 'Attributed to'.³ 

The present sheet is unusual in that it studies the figures from behind, allowing the viewer to see the full horror of the Philistine biting into Samson's flesh in a last desperate attempt to save his life.  It compares in handling to a double-sided study in a New York private collection which was accepted as Tintoretto by Linda Wolk-Simon.⁴

1. Tintoretto, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado 2007, p. 403, cat. nos 55-6

2. See H. Tietze and E. Tietze-Conrat, The Drawings of the Venetian Painters in the 15th and 16th Centuries, New York 1970, pp. 278-303, nos. 1559, 1564, 1566, 1666, 1679, 1707, 1708, 1733, 1734, 1741, 1771, 1772, 1811, 1813, 1814, 1827, 1841, 1842, 1845, 1848, 1860, 1862 

3. Those in the Musée Bonnat, Bayonne (inv. no. 3129), the Courtauld Institute, London (inv. no. 99), the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin (inv. no. 5228), Christ Church, Oxford (inv. no. 0360), the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam and the two drawings at the Fogg.  See Tintoretto, loc.cit., note 3

4. W.M. Griswold and L. Wolk-Simon, Sixteenth-Century Italian Drawings in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994, p. 130, cat. no. 116, reproduced p. 264