Cleveland Museum of Art

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)

Cristoforo Roncalli

Date

1599/1604

Medium

red chalk; squared in red chalk (left half), framing lines in red chalk

Culture

Italy, late 16th-early 17th Century

Department

Drawings

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

In 1590, a generation after Michelangelo’s death, the dome he designed for Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome was finally completed. In 1597 Pope Clement VIII commissioned the mosaic decoration of the interior of the dome, choosing Cristoforo Roncalli in part because of his training in Florence, an origin he shared with Michelangelo. Roncalli made this preparatory drawing for the angels that would appear at each side of the four Evangelists in the trapezoidal spaces where the dome meets the supporting arches, called pendentives. Roncalli practiced rendering the foreshortened human form in three studies across the sheet, which are early stages of the design.

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