Saint Catherine in Prison Converting the Empress Faustina to Christianity, Flanked by Saints Saturnius and Simon

Federico Zuccaro · 1570/71

Medium

Pen and brown ink, with brush and brown wash, heightened with lead white gouache, on blue laid paper

Original size

Sight: 19.6 × 39.5 cm (7 3/4 × 15 9/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

This luminous preparatory drawing captures one of the most dramatic episodes from the legend of Saint Catherine of Alexandria — her miraculous conversion of the Empress Faustina and her companions during imprisonment. Federico Zuccaro was among the most celebrated draughtsmen in late sixteenth-century Rome, admired for the clarity and elegance he brought to Mannerist figure work. His technique on blue laid paper is particularly striking: pen and brown ink define the figures with precision, while white gouache highlights draw the forms into a warm, almost sculptural relief against the tinted ground. The result is a composition that feels both monumental and intimate, organised around the quiet authority of Catherine at its centre. Zuccaro went on to become a founding president of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome — the institution that would shape the formal teaching of art across Italy for generations — a fitting legacy for an artist so committed to draughtsmanship as a discipline in its own right. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the quiet intensity of Zuccaro's original onto canvas, preserving the careful figure groupings, the spatial clarity of the prison setting, and the meditative gravity that makes this work far more than a simple preparatory study.