Ascension of the Virgin

The style of this exceptional red-chalk drawing with watercolour washes suggests the rather recognisable stylistic canons of one of the major figures in early 17th-century Sienese painting, Astolfo Petrazzi¹. The pencil strokes, and especially the watercolour shaping, conceive and stylise the physiognomies of the apostles’ faces as if they were done in wax (as is often the case with Petrazzi)².

The draping is superbly done (deeply furrowed with densely shadowed folds), and can be compared with those drawn by Alessandro Casolani or Francesco Vanni, but in this particular work it has a hieratic quality we might say is typical of later Petrazzi, around 1640.

The background, on the other hand, is all light: the carta intonsa is conceived as a light element, while the rapid, skittish, evanescent and zigzagging lines could be compared with some drawings by Bernardino Mei, an artist Petrazzi would surely have admired for the surprisingly innovative nature of his work, both on paper and on canvas.

The Madonna floats buoyantly above the astonished apostles on puffy clouds washed with a brush; she is at the apex of the composition, while the other figures become smaller towards the edges of the lunette, and one on the far right is almost reclining, with one hand on the ground, as if crushed by the shape of the lunette itself.

The faces of the apostles near the Virgin’s sarcophagus are barely hinted at, with very light pencil marks and quick dots stylising eyes, noses and mouths that recall some drawings by Alessandro Casolani and Francesco Rustici; critics have also noted Petrazzi’s stylistic correlations with Florentine painters like Matteo Rosselli and Cigoli, who share something of the Sienese maestro’s figurative and technical approach³.