Studies of a Seated Female, Child's Head, and Three Studies of a Baby

This drawing comes from Raphael’s "pink sketchbook," a set of ten roughly equal sheets, each portraying variations of a mother and child. The small format of the sheets would have enabled the artist to take the sketchbook with him as he traveled from Florence to Rome around 1508. Raphael used metalpoint on paper prepared with a pink surface, a technique popular in 15th- and early 16th-century Italy. The sheet includes one of Raphael's earliest studies after a nude female model, who is seated on the ground and wears a turban. The infant's head in the drawing was based on that of the Christ child in Leonardo da Vinci's Benois Madonna, then in a private collection in Florence, with changes—such as the uplifted eyes and open mouth—made by Raphael. The three sketches of a reclining infant at the bottom of the sheet are freely handled and improvisational, relaying the child's squirming, continuous movement with repeated contour lines. Raphael later used a similar pose for the Christ child in a painting of the Holy Family (The Madonna of the Veil, c. 1511, Musée Condé, Chantilly).