Study for the Flagellation of Christ

Jacopo Negretti, called Palma Giovane · c. 1602

Medium

Pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash, with black chalk, heightened with touches of white gouache, on dark buff laid paper

Original size

26.5 × 20.2 cm (10 7/16 × 8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

This dynamic preparatory study captures the violent drama of the Flagellation with a raw energy that finished paintings rarely achieve. Palma Giovane — born Jacopo Negretti in Venice around 1548 — was one of the dominant forces in Venetian painting through the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, bridging the legacies of Titian and Tintoretto with his own muscular, Mannerist sensibility. Working in pen and brown ink with washes and chalk on dark buff paper, he used the toned ground itself as a mid-value, building light with white gouache and letting the paper carry the work — a technique that gives the composition its luminous, almost flickering depth. The drawing dates to around 1602, a period when Palma was producing devotional works at extraordinary pace for Venetian churches and private patrons across the Veneto. Among his most celebrated acts was completing Titian's unfinished Pietà after the master's death in 1576, a task that cemented his standing as the keeper of the Venetian tradition. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates this intimate study into the rich, layered medium of oil on canvas, preserving the gestural intensity of Palma's draftsmanship in a form made to endure on any wall.