Man in Armor beside a Chariot
assistant of Francesco Salviati (Italian, 1510–1563)
c. 1550
- Medium
- pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash over black chalk, heightened with white
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 35.7 x 27.1 cm (14 1/16 x 10 11/16 in.); Secondary Support: 35.7 x 27.4 cm (14 1/16 x 10 13/16 in.); Tertiary Support: 35.8 x 27.4 cm (14 1/8 x 10 13/16 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Dudley P. Allen Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
This drawing of a young soldier setting fire to a cart of war trophies may represent a rarely depicted legend about the Macedonian king Alexander the Great (356–323 BC), who built one of the largest empires of the ancient world by the time he was 30 years old. Because the heavy spoils of war were slowing down his troops, Alexander set fire to his own cart of goods to encourage his soldiers to do the same. Renaissance princes revered him as a brilliant military strategist. Emperor Maximilian I (reigned 1486–1519), pictured in the equestrian portrait and in the great triumphal car nearby, considered Alexander a distant ancestor.
