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

Creator

Italian Artist · 1620–1684

Domenico Maria Canuti's contribution to Italian ceiling decoration was a hybrid of Bolognese and Roman influences. He first trained in Bologna under Guido Reni, then with Guercino, whose classical Baroque style remained an inspiration. From the early 1650s, Canuti worked in Rome, where he studied masterpieces by the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci to learn the concepts of organizing large deco

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Date: about 1669–1671
Medium: Red chalk
Culture: Italian
Department: Drawings
Institution: Getty Museum

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 style firmly in Bolognese tradition. Like his predecessor Annibale Carracci, he depicted *ignudi* as real people, with often disconcertingly animated expressions and movements. Canuti's caricature of a man playing a pipe at the right also displays the influence of the Carracci, who were masters of caricature.

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