Description: Numbered in pen and brown ink at lower right: 11 and 8 (Sparre)

According to Licia Ragghianti Collobi, Vasari considered the drawing to be a work of Dello Delli, a painter and sculptor who collaborated with Uccello at "Chiostro Verde" of Santa Maria Novella c. 1446. The blue paper points to a later date, c. 1470. The drawing represents eleven male figures, a small bear and a dog disposed on four levels of a twelve-sided structure. The figures may have existed in separate drawings which were then copied onto this sheet. The central figure in the foreground is presented as the basic formula of an "all'antica" nude, shown frontally "in contrapposto". Most of the other figures are arranged in counterpoint: two lateral figures step up and down respectively, four stand upon the parapet while two more appear in the background. Chastel et alia agree with the Dello Delli attribution. 

The drawing is datable to the third quarter of the "quattrocento" and Meller and Hokin point to its close connection with the "Barberini Panels", the "Birth of the Virgin" in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the "Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple" in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There have been difficulties about attributing the Barberini Panels to a known master. Fra Carnevale, a Dominican monk active in Urbino, was suggested as early as 1893 by Venturi. Venturi later dropped this idea and many different names have since been suggested. In 1975, however, Marilyn Lavin published documents showing that the Barberini Panels were attributed to Fra Carnevale as early as 1644, and consequently much speaks in favour of his authorship both of the Barberini-Panels and our drawing.

Anna Petrioli Tofani is inclined to look for the artist in the circle of Domenico Veneziano who in "St Johan in the desert", the predella of the altarpiece from Santa Lucia dei Magnoli (National Gallery of Art, Washington), has created the immediate precursor of this study of nude men [Bjurström, It. Drawings, cat. no. 1063]

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Dello Delli | Mönsterblad med nakna ynglingar i varierande attityder | Nationalmuseum

Dello Delli | Pattern Sheet of All'antica Nudes in Various Attitudes | Nationalmuseum

Foto: Cecilia Heisser/Nationalmuseum 2018