Recto: Red chalk, heightened with white, the sheet squared for transfer in red chalk;
Verso: red chalk
Bears numbering, upper right, recto: 182

Eric Pagliano, Disegno 2: Retour sur le catalogue des dessins italiens du musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, Rennes, 2015, p. 91, cat. no. 16.

Bernardino Gatti worked for much of his career in Cremona, Parma and Piacenza. Throughout his life he was particularly inspired by the art of Correggio, as can be seen in his earliest altarpiece, a Resurrection painted in 1529 for the Duomo in Cremona. In 1543 he was working in the church of Santa Maria in Campagna in Piacenza, where he was tasked with the completion of a series of frescoes of the Life of the Virgin in the cupola, which had been begun by Pordenone. The late 1540s found Gatti working on several projects in Cremona, notably an Assumption of Christ painted in 1549 for the church of San Sigismondo and a Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes in the refectory of the convent of San Pietro al Po, completed in 1552. In 1560 the artist settled in Parma, where he frescoed an Assumption of the Virgin for the dome of Santa Maria della Steccata, completed in 1572; a work that reveals the influence of Correggio's cupola fresco in the nearby church of San Giovanni Evangelista. Gatti was back in Cremona by 1573, where he began an Assumption of the Virgin for the Duomo, left unfinished at his death.

The recto of the present sheet would appear to be a study for one of Gatti's earliest and best-known works; the large painting of The Virgin Mourning the Dead Christ (or The Lamentation) of c.1528-30, painted for the church of San Domenico in Cremona and now in the Louvre (see Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée and Dominique Thiébaut, Catalogue sommaire illustré des peintures du muse du Louvre, Vol. II: Italie, Espagne, Allemagne, Grande-Bretagne et divers, Paris, 1981, p. 177, reproduced).

Among stylistically comparable drawings by Gatti is a red chalk study of a standing male nude in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes; see Eric Pagliano, op.cit., pp. 88-91, cat. no. 16.

The small sketch on the verso of the present sheet would appear to be a study, in reverse, for a more finished drawing of Saint Sebastian in the Uffizi (Giulio Bora, I disegni lombardi e genovesi del Cinquecento, Treviso, 1980, pp. 60-61, 🌌no. 68, pl. 68), wh🌱ich remains unrelated to any surviving painting or fresco by Gatti.