The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (recto); Sketch of the Virgin and Child (?) (verso)

Trained in the workshop of Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530), the Florentine Mannerist Pierfrancesco Foschi was virtually unknown before Myril Pouncey’s pioneering article published in 1957, where she described the present sheet as one of the most attractive in the artist’s meager corpus of drawings (op. cit.). Energetically rendered in red chalk, using a technique and facial types that closely resemble the work of Jacopo Pontormo (1494-1557) - at the time a young associate in Sarto’s shop - the drawing can be dated to the mid-1520s and was likely executed in preparation for Foschi’s Holy Family and the Infant Saint John the Baptist, a painting now in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (Fig. 1; inv. 1890 no. 235; A. Cecchi, Around the David: The Great Art of Michelangelo’s Century, Florence, 2003, no. 6, ill.).

Fig. 1. Pierfrancesco Foschi, The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John, Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia