Annibale Carracci

Life drawing was a central activity of the Carracci family's academy, and that bold naturalism that arose from the practice was one of the defining characteristics of the Carracci reform of painting, which moved away from the Mannerism of the later sixteenth century and began the era of Baroque art in Rome. This sheet is one of a handful of related experiments to survive (others are in the Ashmolean Museum, the Swedish Nationalmuseum, the Louvre, and the Tobey Collection) in which models were drawn from multiple angles while posed in unconventional positions; this example is surely by Annibale Carracci, and there are closely related sheets by Annibale's brother Agostino and cousin Ludovico. Moreover, Annibale's drawing, or one closely related to it, then served as the basis for Ludovico's remarkable early Lamentation now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a regular practice for one member of the Carracci family to use drawings by another member as the basis for painted figures.
A famous sheet, formerly in the collections of Jonathan Richardson, the Earl of Burlington, and Hugh Squire, this drawing has often been published but was unseen between the 1979 Squire sale and its acquisition by the Morgan in 2024.