ABSTRACT
The exhibition Federico Barocci: Renaissance Master and the attendant symposium in St. Louis in January 2013 offered exceptional occasions for reflection on Barocci's art, his historical position, and in particular his preparatory process. Despite his frustrations, other drawings for the Conception reveal how an ambitious modern painter, sensitive to Christian image traditions and their significance for some of his patrons, managed to transform an archaic image type into a compelling modern work. It was during the 1570s when Barocci produced a drawing that exhibits an investigation of the female nude exceeding anything else in his career. Barocci's devotion at once to study from life and from art means that ultimately one cannot easily delimit the sources of his figures. The great "vision" altarpieces of Raphael would repeatedly inspire Barocci's meditations on altarpiece design, as evident in another highlight of the exhibition, the Madonna of the Rosary of 1589-93.
