Sheet of Figure Studies and Ornamental Motifs (recto and verso)

Acquired by the Museum as 'Anonymous Florentine,' this double-sided sheet from a dismembered sketchbook reveals stylistic elements closely indebted to the Roman vocabulary of Raphael and the young Polidoro da Caravaggio. Tamagni, who was born in San Gimignano (and probably trained by Sebastiano Mainardi) retained a Tuscan sense of sculptural 'disegno,' but whose graphic vocabulary appears transformed by contact with Raphael's 'bottega' in Rome ca. 1512-1520, as it attained a new measure of Classical monumentality. While this sketchbook page is not easily datable, it is plausibly from 1515-1530, and perhaps even from the mid-to-late 1520s, as it is exactly comparable in style to a sheet of sketches for Tamagni's signed altarpiece of the Assumption at the Madonna del Soccorso in Montalcino, which is dated 1527 (Musee du Louvre, inv. 1248), as well as to four other sheets by Tamagni in Turin (Biblioteca Reale, inv. nos. 15820, 15823, and 15824).

Tamagni's expressive, sketchy mode of drawing figures is distinctive: small heads and elongated bodies, highly abstract articulations of limbs and facial features (of circles and lines), boldly inflected planes of interior hatching, and jaggedly reinforced contours. Much like one of the Turin sketchbook pages that is of similar measurements (Biblioteca Reale, inv. 15820), the recto and verso of the quickly-drawn Metropolitan double-sided sheet contain copious sketches of diverse subject matter. The Metropolitan recto represents two ideas for the portrait of a young man standing by a curtain in contemporary costume (the bodice and codpiece resemble those in the Biblioteca Reale, inv. 15820, recto), a seated hunting dog, various nearly nude female figures, and 'all'antica' ornament. The unpublished verso of the sheet depicts among several other figures, some Madonna and Child designs clearly inspired by Raphael and Michelangelo, as well as sketches of a standing female nude presumably based on an Antique statue of Venus. Tamagni's pen drawing style here is also evocative of Baccio Bandinelli's summary figural sketches of 1524, connected with the production of the marble reliefs for the Santa Casa di Loreto.
(Carmen C. Bambach, 2007)