Originated from a living model posing, the Asleep male nude […] with the bust reclined, the head hidden by the right arm and with the left arm abandoned along the hip – seems too articulated and complex to not have any relevancy with the paintings of Procaccini. From here, the hypothesis that the Asleep male nude here examined can be a first idea of the figure of sleeping Argus – sited at the bottom of a tree, indeed – in the canvas with the Mercury and Argus painted by the artist as a pièce d’admittance in occasion of his nominee as a Saint Luke academic in the 1716.
The dating around the half of the second decade of the 18th […] encourage to see […] a possible primordial connection between the draped figure on the back and the oval of Daniel the Prophet made by Procaccini around the 1716-1718 and related to the series of the Twelve Prophets commissioned by Pope Clements XI Albani to several artist for the naves of Saint John in Lateran’s Basilica.

Excerpt of the expertise by doc. Maria Cecilia Fabbri