Sketches of Virgin and Child

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

This sheet of sketches was drawn from imagination in preparation for a painting. Here, the artist explored five different ways to capture the motion of a restless child enfolded in its mother’s embrace. Blue-gray papers like this were made from indigo-dyed rags and typically used for drawings by 16th-century Venetian artists such as Giulio Campi to study the painterly effects of light and shade. Sixteenth-century artists from the northern provinces of Italy like Giulio Campi often focused on painterly effects such as light and shadow, rather than line, in their drawings.