Two Studies of a Man

Santi di Tito

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A pupil of Bronzino and Alessandro Allori, Santi di Tito was among the founders in 1563 of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno (the Academy of Drawing). He had a leading role among the generation of late-sixteenth-century Tuscan painters who turned to the practice of carefully observed life drawing to direct their pictorial language away from an abstract Mannerist vocabulary and toward one of greater naturalism. Of great psychological presence, the figure of the balding, bearded man with a flaccid torso in this life study is portrayed with uncompromising veracity. The artist played the softly blended chalk against the white of the paper to create a delicate luminous effect. The naturalistic vocabulary of the figure is reminiscent of Santi di Tito's Resurrection altarpiece in Santa Croce, Florence of 1573–74, and The Supper at Emaus of 1574.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art