Various Sketches of the Madonna and Child (recto) (c. 1580): Art, History and Details

Various Sketches of the Madonna and Child (recto) (c. 1580) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Paolo Veronese (Italian, 1528–1588).

The work and its context

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

In the last decades of his career, Paolo Veronese and his workshop produced a number of idyllic visions of the Holy Family in repose in the countryside during their flight into Egypt. This crowded sheet of loose, lively sketches was recently proposed to have inaugurated an intensive period of interest in this subject that began around 1570. The sheet shows two horizontal rows with eight versions of the seated Virgin holding the Christ Child, in some of the sketches accompanied by the infant John the Baptist or Joseph, and in one by a donkey. The sheet presents an unusual case of being preparatory not for paintings, but for finished chiaroscuro drawings, now in London, Berlin, and Cambridge, MA. While the individual sketches may appear at first glance a mass of tangled lines and confused forms, such pen and ink drawings demonstrate the Venetian artist's restless creative energy.

Object facts

• Title: Various Sketches of the Madonna and Child (recto)
• Date: c. 1580
• Creator attribution: Paolo Veronese (Italian, 1528–1588)
• Culture: Italy, Venice
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and brown ink (iron gall) and brush and brown wash
• Dimensions: Sheet: 20.5 x 23.4 cm (8 1/16 x 9 3/16 in.); Secondary Support: 22 x 28.2 cm (8 11/16 x 11 1/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1939.670.a

A detail from the museum

The sheet of paper was a more vibrant, pure blue when the drawing was made; aging has rendered the color of the sheet closer to a green-gray.

Collection credit

Gift of Robert Hays Gries

Further reading listed by the museum

• Clayton, Stephen W. Veronese & His Studio In North American Collections. [Birmingham, Ala.]: [Birmingham Museum of Art], 1972.
• Johnson, Mark M. Idea to Image: Preparatory Studies from the Renaissance to Impressionism. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980.
• Olszewski, Edward J., and Jane Glaubinger. The Draftsman's Eye: Late Italian Renaissance Schools and Styles. Cleveland: Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with the Indiana University Press, 1981.

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.