The Flagellation of Christ

Jacopo Negretti, called Palma Giovane · by 1594

Medium

Pen and brown and black ink and brush and iron-gall ink wash, over black chalk, heightened with white gouache, on tan laid paper, pieced along right edge and incised

Original size

41.3 × 29 cm (16 5/16 × 11 7/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

The Flagellation of Christ is a work of charged stillness — figures caught mid-motion in a web of ink and shadow that somehow feels more urgent than paint. Palma Giovane was one of the last great painters of the Venetian Renaissance, a direct link between Titian, under whom he studied briefly, and the more dramatic Baroque sensibility that followed. This drawing, made before 1594, shows his working method at its most transparent: black chalk lays in the composition, then ink and wash build the drama, with white gouache pulling light from the tan paper itself. The result is less a preparatory sketch and more a finished statement — the kind of study that reveals how a master thinks, not just what he produced. Palma Giovane completed Titian's unfinished Pietà after the older master's death in 1576, a responsibility that speaks to the esteem he commanded among his contemporaries. This hand-painted oil reproduction translates the drawing's interplay of light and dark into the richer tonal range of oil on canvas, preserving the compositional tension and expressive energy that Palma Giovane built into every mark, while giving the image a physical presence that suits a wall rather than an archive drawer.