The Holy Family with Angels
Pomarancio (Cristoforo Roncalli)
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
This powerful drawing with the Virgin Mary, St Joseph and the Christ Child accompanied by angels was first published in 1952 by Philip Pouncey, who recognized it as a study for Roncalli's painting of ‘The Holy Family’ now in the Galleria Borghese, Rome (Inv. 330). The painting and the related drawing are datable to ca. 1603-1605. Drawn in black chalk, this sheet represents a bold example of Roncalli’s draftsmanship at the dawn of the seventeenth century, inspired by the monumentality of Michelangelo and Giuseppe Cesari, Cavaliere d’Arpino. The indented lines on the recto of the sheet and the extensive rubbing with black chalk dust on the verso of the paper are both signs of the ‘calco’ technique – a practice adopted to copy or transfer the design onto a secondary support to produce model drawings of identical scale. In 1964 Jacob Bean found a second study in Florence (GDSU, inv. 15428 F; 38.7 x 27.3 cm) for the same painting. In contrast to the Museum’s drawing, the Florentine composition is worked out in black, red, and white chalk on blue paper ( repr. in ‘Disegni dei toscani a Roma, 1580-1620', Florence, 1979, no. 27). The composition of the two preparatory drawings also differs in a number of details, and both, in turn, differ slightly from the painting in Rome. (F.R.)
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.