Sketches of Virgin and Child (1550–1600): Art, History and Details

Sketches of Virgin and Child (1550–1600) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Giulio Campi (Italian, c. 1500–1572).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This sheet of sketches was drawn from imagination in preparation for a painting. Here, the artist explored five different ways to capture the motion of a restless child enfolded in its mother’s embrace. Blue-gray papers like this were made from indigo-dyed rags and typically used for drawings by 16th-century Venetian artists such as Giulio Campi to study the painterly effects of light and shade.

Object facts

• Title: Sketches of Virgin and Child
• Date: 1550–1600
• Creator attribution: Giulio Campi (Italian, c. 1500–1572)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black chalk; framing lines in traces of gold ink
• Dimensions: Sheet: 20.3 x 13.4 cm (8 x 5 1/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1924.1002

A detail from the museum

Sixteenth-century artists from the northern provinces of Italy like Giulio Campi often focused on painterly effects such as light and shadow, rather than line, in their drawings.

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Olszewski, Edward J., and Jane Glaubinger. The Draftsman’s Eye: Late Italian Renaissance Schools and Styles. Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with the Indiana University Press, 1981
• Miller, Michael J., Drawing, a Glossary of Materials: Selections from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1987
• Olszewski, Edward J., Burton L. Dunbar, Robert Munman, et al. Sixteenth-Century Italian Drawings. Corpus of Drawings in Midwestern Collections. Harvey Miller, 2008.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.