Charity / The Virgin and Saint Elizabeth
XVI century.Not on display
The rather dry technique of drawing in red chalk on light blue-grey paper suggest the work of the Bolognese painter Bartolomeo Cesi, who travelled to Rome in 1591, thought he may have visited the city before then.
The partial copy from Sebastiano del Piombo (c. 1475-1547) on the verso does not seem to be an offset, as the complier of the entry from the nineteenth-century French sale catalogue claimed, but a direct copy from the sixteenth-century master´s fresco, datable after 1530, formerly in S. Maria della Pace, Rome, of which only three fragments survive in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle, Northumberland.
Turner, Nicholas, From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracci. A century of Italian drawings from the Prado, Chicago, Art Services International, 2008, p.294
