Getty Museum

View of Saint Peter's (recto); Study of a Young Man (verso)

Creator

Italian Artist · 1541–1609

After Titian's death in 1576, Federico Zuccaro may have been the most famous painter in Europe as well as the most influential, traveling widely and creating a huge number of works, largely of religious subjects. The son of a painter in Urbino, he absorbed Mannerism in Rome under his brother Taddeo, who was a dozen years his senior. When Taddeo died in 1566, Federico took over his flourishing prac

More on Getty ULAN

Date: 1603
Medium: Red chalk (recto); Red and black chalk (verso)
Culture: Italian
Department: Drawings
Institution: Getty Museum
Object ID: 954f7edb-0369-417e-b9e2-2924b7762232

From the Getty Museum record

Using red chalk in a highly detailed manner, Federico Zuccaro depicted Saint Peter's Square in Rome as it appeared in 1603, with the Egyptian obelisk in place at the extreme left and the church dome complete. At the left, the archepiscopal palace adjoins the old facade of Saint Peter's basilica. In the center, the three-story benediction loggia begun by Pope Pius II in 1462 adjoins the loggia painted by Raphael, lightly sketched at the extreme right. The bastion for the papal guard protects the front of the Vatican entrance, and statues of saints Peter and Paul from the 1400s adorn the foot of the staircase. On the verso, Zuccaro drew a young boy with great intimacy, using the same medium--black and red chalk--and the same delicacy of touch seen in his other late portrait studies. Zuccaro's use of color was innovative: scholars recognize him as the first Italian of his time to combine black with red chalk, a technique practiced earlier by Hans Holbein.

View at Getty Museum ↗

The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.

Get printable QR codes

Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.

Open this page

See at Getty Museum

Related across collections

Semantically similar works from Getty Museum and other institutions.

Study for Saint Peter

Getty Museum

#d9c19f19-ac14-4e5f-b510-e45e220cb7a6

View of Saint Peter's Square and Basilica in Rome

Minneapolis Institute of Art

#109278

Three Studies of Angels for a Pendentive (recto); Studies for Christ Meeting His Mother on the Road to Calvary, Studies of an Angel in a Pendentive (verso)

Cleveland Museum of Art

#154880

Taddeo in the Belvedere Court in the Vatican Drawing the Laocoön

Getty Museum

#3d4aa565-5f56-43c8-88c6-06632fd9c0fd

Three Studies of Angels for a Pendentive (recto)

Cleveland Museum of Art

#154881

Interior of Saint Peter's Basilica

Getty Museum

#faa0fffe-af76-4855-8afd-109d090b05f0

Study for the Head of Saint Joseph (recto); Two Studies of Legs (verso)

Getty Museum

#c392263f-5754-47ba-ac27-dfa8662583bc

Half-Section of the Model of the Attic and Dome of Saint Peter's Basilica as Conceived by Michelangelo (recto); Detail Studies Relating to the Plan, Section, and Elevation of the Dome of Saint Peter's Basilica (verso).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

#364509