Male nude walking seen from behind

The tentative attribution of this large pastel to the Neapolitan artist Andrea de Leone is based on the close physiognomic and stylistic resemblance be- tween the nude male model and the artist’s virile figures. This sort of character, appropriately defined 'gesticulating' by scholars, is in fact very common in de Leone’s canvases and drawings¹.

Typologically, the sheet can be compared to a group of 'walking' nude studies intended as academic exercises and executed during the artist’s attendance at the Neapolitan Academy of Aniello Falcone (1607- 1656), where, according to the sources, he became ‘very expert in drawing and above all in nudes’². This interest for the nude was later reinforced through his contacts with Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609- 1664) and Andrea Sacchi (1599-1661).

The same posture of the male figure in our drawing, also studied in combination with a drapery, returns in a sheet in the Philadelphia Museum of Art; it is also developed in many of de Leone’s historical paintings (fig. 1) and in his only known engraving (fig. 2)³.

These figures are directly inspired by the 'dancing' characters of Nicolas Poussin, an important model for de Leone’s and his environment and which the artist had been able to study in person during his Roman sojourn (1630)⁴.

The sheet discussed here is a finished study. It was probably intended for a collector and could have been part of a larger series. According to the sources, de Leone's drawings were represented in the best collections of his time, including that of Cesare Firrao, prince of Tarsia, and of Gaspare de Haro y Guzman, Marquis del Carpio and viceroy of Naples between 1683 and 1687⁵. The artist’s use of colour, so far attested only in a sketch in Windsor, looks probably to the works on paper by Castiglione, whose example had a strong impact on him towards the end of the 1630s⁶.