The Presentation in the Temple

Girolamo da Santacroce · n.d.

Medium

Red chalk, with pen and brown ink and traces of black chalk, on cream laid paper, squared in pen and brown ink and ruled along the perimeter in red chalk

Original size

19 × 19.9 cm (7 1/2 × 7 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

This study for The Presentation in the Temple reveals the quiet discipline of a Venetian artist carefully thinking through one of Christian art's most ceremonial subjects — the moment the infant Christ is brought to the Temple in Jerusalem and presented before God. Girolamo da Santacroce worked in Venice during the early sixteenth century, shaped by the legacy of Giovanni Bellini and the wider Venetian tradition of tender, devotional painting. This sheet — combining red chalk, pen and brown ink, and traces of black chalk on cream laid paper — offers a rare view into his working process. The grid of squares drawn across the surface is a transfer method used by Renaissance artists to scale a composition accurately onto a larger panel or canvas, meaning this drawing was almost certainly a direct blueprint for a painted altarpiece or devotional work. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the sheet as part of its Italian drawings collection, where it remains one of the more intimate records of Santacroce's methodical approach to sacred narrative. The hand-painted oil reproduction honours that original intention — carrying the composition forward into the medium for which it was designed, with the warmth and physical presence that only paint on canvas can provide.