Assumption of the Virgin

Francesco Bartolozzi · n.d.

Medium

Pen and brown ink, with brush and brown wash, heightened with white gouache, over traces of graphite, on cream laid paper

Original size

25.9 × 21.4 cm (10 1/4 × 8 7/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

Bartolozzi's *Assumption of the Virgin* is a luminous devotional drawing that carries the full drama of heavenly ascent within the restrained vocabulary of ink and wash on paper. Francesco Bartolozzi was born in Florence in 1727 and trained under the engraver Joseph Wagner in Venice before becoming one of the most admired draughtsmen and printmakers of the eighteenth century. His pen and brown ink technique — layered here with brown wash and lifted with white gouache highlights — reveals the dual discipline of a master who thought simultaneously in line and in light. The result has a silvery tonal range unusual for works on paper, the gouache describing celestial radiance with the same precision he brought to his celebrated engravings. Bartolozzi spent much of his later career in London, where he was a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768 and produced reproductive prints after Guercino, Raphael, and others — earning him an international reputation that outlasted his drawing practice in the public eye. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates this intimate, intimate work into the richer, more material world of oil on canvas, preserving Bartolozzi's compositional authority and delicate gradations of tone while giving the image the physical presence the original drawing, by its nature, withholds.