Holy Family, Accompanied by an Angel and Two Saints
XVI century.Not on display
The invention and handling are in fact typical of Passerotti’s more rapidly drawn sketches. Compared with the better-known, finished pen studies, such as Male Head (D1781), his pen line here seems all of a sudden euphorically liberated. The halftones, instead of being indicated by dense cross-hatching, are brushed in with fluid brown washes. For comparison with the present sheet, a good example of such a rapid pen-and-wash study is the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple in the Gabinetto dei Disegni of the Uffizi, Florence, for Passerotti’s altarpiece painted in 1583, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna.
Turner, Nicholas, From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracci. A century of Italian drawings from the Prado, Chicago, Art Services International, 2008, p.341
