Study for the Pietà

Giulio Cesare Procaccini

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Nancy Ward Neilson identified this drawing as a study for the 'Pietà' in the Milanese church of Santa Maria presso San Celso, which is Giulio Cesare Procaccini's earliest known oil painting and which the artist delivered in 1604. There are only minor differences between the Museum's composition study and the painting. A sheet of pen and ink figure studies by Giulio Cesare Procaccini in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan has been convincingly connected with the same 'Pietà' by Emma Spina Barelli (Disegni di maestri lombardi del primo Seicento, Milan 1959, no. 31, and reproduced in M. Valsecchi, I grandi disegni italiani del '600 lombardo all Ambrosiana, Milan 1975, p. 43, fig. 27).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art