The Virgin walking with the Christ Child and the Infant Saint John

As first noted by Lloyd (op. cit.), this sheet relates closely to the motif of a woman leading two children treated by Michelangelo in a drawing on panel in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. 1846.309) and in another, (now divided into two), in the Louvre (inv. 710 and 725); see P. Joannides, Inventaire Général des Dessins Italiens, VI, Michel-Ange, élèves et copistes, Paris, 2003, nos. 22 and 23), both of the 1520s. Sometimes identified as the Return of the Holy Family from Egypt, this subject is usually identified as that represented in Michelangelo’s large cartoon of the Epifania, executed in the 1550s for his pupil and biographer Ascanio Condivi (1525-1574), whom Professor Paul Joannides put forward as a possible candidate for the authorship of the present drawing (Joannides 2007, op. cit., p. 134 and p. 486). While the Bloxam drawing is likely to be a derivation rather than a precise copy of the lost drawing by Michelangelo it nevertheless provides a significant insight into the development of an important invention of Michelangelo’s late career.

We are grateful to Professor Paul Joannides for his assistance in cataloguing this drawing.