The Descent of Christ into Limbo

Formerly attributed to Pellegrino Tibaldi, this striking drawing instead appears to be Tuscan. Elements of the vigorous chalk underdrawing, such as the elegantly Mannerist figure of Saint John the Baptist on the extreme left, recall the drawings of Beccafumi while the facial features of the female saint standing in the right background are similar to those of Barocci's women. The composition, however, has Florentine precedents: the arrangement of figures and their sinuous poses seem to relate to the circle of artists who decorated Duke Cosimo I's Studiolo under the leadership of Giorgio Vasari. Moreover, the central figures of the composition - Christ, Adam and Eve and the prostrate figure behind Christ - are extremely close to those in Agnolo Bronzino's Christ in Limbo, painted in 1552 for the Church of Santa Croce. Nevertheless the draughtsman used Bronzino's composition only as a touchstone, developing his vision into a very different horizontal format.

The draughtsmanship is very close to that of Jacopo Zucchi, one of Vasari's closest collaborators on the Studiolo. There are particular stylistic similarities with Zucchi's drawings of Aesculapius at the British Museum (inv. 1953-1-212-10; Turner 151) and Atlas and Hercules in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (illustrated in E. Pillsbury, 'Drawings by Jacopo Zucchi', Master Drawings, 12, no. 1, 1974, pl. 17).