The Trinity with Christ Bearing the Cross

Raffaello Vanni · n.d.

Medium

Pen and black ink with brush and gray wash, heightened with white gouache, squared in graphite, on gray tinted laid paper, laid down on board

Original size

20.2 × 10.8 cm (8 × 4 5/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

This devotional study by Raffaello Vanni brings together two of Christian iconography's most charged subjects — the Trinity and the Passion — in a composition of quiet, luminous intensity. Vanni was a seventeenth-century Sienese painter whose work sat at the intersection of Roman Baroque grandeur and the more intimate spiritual tradition of his native city. Trained under Rutilio Manetti and deeply influenced by Guido Reni, he became one of Siena's most sought-after painters of religious subjects. This sheet, executed in pen and black ink with gray wash and white gouache highlights on tinted paper, is a working drawing squared in graphite — evidence that Vanni intended to transfer this composition to a larger painted surface, scaling each element with precision across the grid. The squaring method, common among Italian masters from the Renaissance onward, gives scholars a rare window into how a finished altarpiece or devotional canvas began as a carefully plotted study. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates Vanni's considered draughtsmanship into the warm, layered medium for which the tradition was ultimately intended — restoring depth and presence to a composition that was always destined for paint and light.