Getty Museum
Study for the Kneeling Virgin
Creator
Tanzio da VaralloItalian Artist · 1575–1580
All works by this person →Tanzio da Varallo may have first trained in his father's sculpture workshop and with his brother, a fresco painter. His dramatic, tense manner combined the elegance of his native Lombard late Mannerism with Caravaggio's realism, a style he discovered while visiting Rome before 1615. Recent discoveries of Tanzio's paintings have lent credence to his early biographer L.A. Costa's reports that he stu
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1625
- Medium
- Red chalk, on pink prepared paper
- Culture
- Italian
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
In this drawing, Tanzio da Varallo studied the drapery for the kneeling Virgin Mary in an *Annunciation* painting now presumed lost during World War II. Modeling only the drapery in detail, da Varallo explored how the fabric would lie on the Virgin's body, how much of the body's structure he should reveal, how to attractively yet convincingly arrange the folds, and how light would play on the surfaces and shape the forms. The sense of volume conveyed in his drapery studies reveals his training in sculpture. Da Varallo usually focused his studies on a single feature. Here he only slightly indicated the Virgin's head and hands; in another study he concentrated closely on the heads, hands, and feet, leaving the drapery nearly blank.
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