Kicking Player

This is a working sheet, not a finished picture. Around 1530 Pontormo drew this single male nude in chalk, one leg thrown out in a hard kick, the body twisted so far it seems about to fall off the paper. He worked from a live model in the studio, chasing a pose rather than a story.

Nearly 400 of his drawings survive, most of them here in the Uffizi's cabinet of drawings, and they are where you actually watch him think. A figure like this one he could turn over, re-pose and, months later, fold into a painting or a fresco, its origin as a studio study long forgotten.

The chalk still shows where he pressed harder to fix a shin or a shoulder.