Standing Draped Male Figure with Raised Right Arm

Carlo Urbino · n.d.

Medium

Black chalk, with brush and brown wash, heightened with white gouache, on blue laid paper, tipped onto cream card

Original size

25.1 × 14.8 cm (9 15/16 × 5 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

A study in balance and contained energy, this drawing captures a draped male figure mid-gesture, the raised right arm lending the composition an almost rhetorical weight that feels both classical and immediate. Carlo Urbino was a Milanese draughtsman working in the mid-to-late sixteenth century, deeply rooted in the Lombard tradition shaped by Leonardo da Vinci's influence on the region. His figure studies reveal a draughtsman preoccupied with how drapery moves against the body — the folds here are not decorative but structural, describing the form beneath. The combination of black chalk, brown wash, and white gouache on blue paper was a standard but demanding technique of the period, requiring the artist to work across three tonal layers simultaneously to model light and shadow convincingly. The blue laid paper itself was a favoured support among Italian Renaissance draughtsmen; its mid-tone ground allowed the white highlights to register with particular clarity, giving figures like this one a luminous, almost sculptural presence. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates that layered tonal logic into paint, preserving the quiet authority of Urbino's line work and the warm interplay of light falling across draped cloth.