Bathers at San Niccolò

The Mannerist painting depicts men bathing in the River Arno near the crenelated Tower of San Niccolò in Florence.

The painting may also draw on a pair of engravings by Albrecht Dürer of bathing men and women, and paintings of public baths made by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, particularly Michelangelo's uncompleted (and now lost) fresco of the Battle of Cascina made for the Room of the Great Council now the Salone dei Cinquecento) at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence between 1504 and 1508, known from engravings of the (also lost) cartoon.

The completed oil painting depicts a number of muscular men in or beside the river: stripping off, entering and leaving the water, bathing, conversing, and embracing.

It appeared with the art dealers Reid and Lefevre in London by 1959, and passed through several private collections, before being sold at Sotheby's in New York City in 2017 for US$732,500.

The auction catalogue described it as "perhaps the most important artistic example of homoerotic art of the late Mannerist period", anticipating by 300 years paintings such as Thomas Eakins's The Swimming Hole.