Cleveland Museum of Art

Sketches of Virgin and Child

Giulio Campi

Date

1550–1600

Medium

black chalk; framing lines in traces of gold ink

Culture

Italy, 16th century

Department

Drawings

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

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.

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