Barocci - Portrait of a Young Girl at the NGV

Portrait of a young girl

(c. 1575-1579)

Artist/s name

Federico BAROCCI

Medium

oil on canvas

Measurements

50.0 x 34.8 cm

National Gallery of Victoria.

Related research into one of his more known works:
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/LotDetailsPrintable.aspx?intObjectID=5175851 :

The head of Saint John the Evangelist by Fredrico Barocci 1580: oil study for The Entombment of Christ in the church of Santa Croce, Senigallia oil on paper laid down on canvas .
The impressive quantity of extant drawings by Federico Barocci - almost 2000 works - has prompted scholars to explore their relationship to his paintings, in which, it has been noted, "a great majority are connected with his painted compositions, complementing them as well as elucidating the creative process that brought them into being" (N. Turner, Federico Barocci, Paris, 2000, p. 150)

Barocci worked out the lighting and chromatic schemes in compositional sketches, or 'cartoncini'. The 'sketches for chiaroscuro' were, logically, monochromatic works on paper (a study of this type for The Entombment is in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; inv. 85.GG.26, 47.5 x 37 cm.; previously Chatsworth). The 'sketches for colors' were usually painted on canvas (and include Study for The Entombment in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino and the newly discovered, highly finished study in a Belgian private collection; see N. Turner, op. cit., p. 151). No matter what the support, these works vary in size but were always smaller than the final painting.


Before setting to work on the final canvas Barocci would work out a full-scale cartoon for the painting, the only stage in the process to be produced in a 1:1 ratio. (The largest surviving cartoon by Barocci is the 'reduced cartoon' for The Entombment -- fig. 2; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 113 x 90.4 cm.). The Head of Saint John and similar studies for principle figures in the composition would have been traced from this cartoon onto individual sheets. Marciari and Verstegen emphasize that in the rare cases that a stylus was used for this, the medium -- either pastel or oil -- skips over the incised lines indicating that the contour was transferred to the blank sheets and not from the sheets to the painting or cartoon, proving that these studies were in fact the step between the cartoon and the final canvas. The oil and pastel head studies "are sketchy in their exploration of light and color if not of contour, because this had already been worked out" (op. cit., p. 309). Raphael's 'auxiliary cartoons' are cited as the only known precedents for this practice and it is safe to assume that Barocci knew these from collections in Urbino; this term has been adopted to describe Barocci's colored head studies.