A drawing of a nude male figure, seated with his right arm raised above his head, together with te left leg of another figure - a copy of the figures to the right of St Paul in Michelangelo's Last Judgement.

Demonstrating a crosshatching rather closer to Michelangelo’s own than most other drawings by Passarotti, this drawing suggests that he was copying the Last Judgement in a style influenced by his knowledge of the master’s earlier draftsmanship. Copying rather than inventing, Passarotti uses a handling less self-consciously wild than usual. Although the group is left incomplete, the artist’s intention was clearly to produce a self-contained image, since he has hatched an offsetting shadow around the figures on the left. Despite a slight awkwardness in the contour of the main figure’s inner thigh, the definition of forms, especially in the detached leg, is well controlled. The drawing demonstrates the high level of sensitivity to local modulations of form that Passarotti could attain in his more careful pen studies.

Despite the drawing’s intelligent response to Michelangelo’s group, it was probably not made directly from the fresco, but from an intermediate copy, most likely one by Passarotti himself. The figures in the fresco have been modified by the omission of the right-hand figure’s right arm, which stretches across the chest of the principal figure. There was evidently a conscious intention to regularise Michelangelo’s forms, and the drawing may have been made with didactic intent some years after Passarotti’s Roman sojourn. C. Höper (Bartolomeo Passarotti, 1987, no. A360) disputed the attribution to Passarotti, placing the drawing among the works by his followers.

On the verso of the sheet is a faint chalk sketch that appears to be a study for a round-topped altarpiece.

Inscribed at lower right 'Del Passerotto', in an early hand found on a number of sheets at Windsor; and on a reinforcing strip formerly on the verso, in the hand of William Gibson, 'Passerotto 2.3.'.

Text adapted from P. Joannides, Michelangelo and his Influence, 1996, no. 58.