Various Sketches of the Madonna and Child (recto)
Paolo Veronese (Italian, 1528–1588)
c. 1580
- Medium
- pen and brown ink (iron gall) and brush and brown wash
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 20.5 x 23.4 cm (8 1/16 x 9 3/16 in.); Secondary Support: 22 x 28.2 cm (8 11/16 x 11 1/8 in.)
- Culture
- Italy, Venice
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of Robert Hays Gries
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
In the last decades of his career, Paolo Veronese and his workshop produced a number of idyllic visions of the Holy Family in repose in the countryside during their flight into Egypt. This crowded sheet of loose, lively sketches was recently proposed to have inaugurated an intensive period of interest in this subject that began around 1570. The sheet shows two horizontal rows with eight versions of the seated Virgin holding the Christ Child, in some of the sketches accompanied by the infant John the Baptist or Joseph, and in one by a donkey. The sheet presents an unusual case of being preparatory not for paintings, but for finished chiaroscuro drawings, now in London, Berlin, and Cambridge, MA. While the individual sketches may appear at first glance a mass of tangled lines and confused forms, such pen and ink drawings demonstrate the Venetian artist's restless creative energy.
