Magician Making a Prediction to an Emperor (recto); Male Nude Carrying a Load (verso)

Unknown Italian · 17th century

Medium

Brush and brown ink and wash, heightened with white gouache (recto), and black chalk, with traces of white chalk (verso), on blue laid paper

Original size

37 × 27 cm (14 5/8 × 10 11/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

This striking double-sided sheet draws you into the theatrical world of seventeenth-century Italian draughtsmanship, where a robed magician commands the attention of an enthroned emperor on one face, and a muscular figure strains under the weight of a heavy load on the other. Though the artist remains unidentified, the work reflects the sophisticated drawing culture of Baroque Italy, where artists trained rigorously from the nude and then channelled that anatomical knowledge into dramatic, narrative compositions. The use of brown ink and wash, heightened with white gouache on tinted blue paper, was a favoured technique of the period — the coloured ground doing half the work of suggesting depth and atmosphere before a single mark was made. The recto and verso together suggest a working artist moving fluidly between the imaginative and the academic. The sheet is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, which houses one of North America's most significant holdings of Old Master drawings. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the delicate tonal drama of the original — its warm browns, shadowed washes, and crisp white highlights — onto canvas, preserving the intimacy and skill of a work that was never meant to be a spectacle, but quietly is one.