Presentation of the Body of Saint Antoninus of Florence

Giovanni Battista Paggi · 1589/90

Medium

Pen and brown ink, with brush and brown wash, over black chalk, on cream laid paper, laid down on white wove tissue

Original size

27.9 × 42.2 cm (11 × 16 5/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

Giovanni Battista Paggi's preparatory drawing for the Presentation of the Body of Saint Antoninus of Florence carries the quiet gravity of devotion rendered in line and shadow. Paggi was one of the most accomplished draughtsmen working in late sixteenth-century Genoa, trained in the Florentine tradition during a lengthy period of exile from his home city — Genoese law at the time prohibited noblemen from practising painting as a trade. That enforced time in Florence sharpened both his technical fluency and his sensitivity to Counter-Reformation subjects. This sheet, built up through black chalk, pen, and layered brown wash, demonstrates his command of tonal modelling: figures emerge from the cream laid paper with sculptural weight, the wash doing the work that oil glaze would in a finished canvas. The drawing, now held by the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of the clearest surviving records of Paggi working through a complex figural composition before committing it to panel. A hand-painted oil reproduction translates Paggi's disciplined study into the warmer, more resonant language he himself would have used for the final work — bringing depth, texture, and colour to a composition that exists in the archives only as ink on paper.