ABSTRACT
It may be merely coincidence, but the earliest surviving compositional study for the Crucifixion was sketched over a beautiful red chalk drawing, still visible in the upper left quadrant, for the Virgin in Barocci's small ex-voto, the Madonna of Saint John. This early pose used in the Uffizi study for the Crucifixion was probably abandoned when Barocci decided to make John's and Mary's positions contrast, designing John to reach out and conceiving Mary as pulling in. The same kind of deliberative thought informed Barocci's design for the Visitation, the meeting between Mary and Elizabeth when both were pregnant with their remarkable offspring. Barocci refined the image of the two figures meeting on the stairs when he began working on the splendid sheet of studies from Stockholm. In none of the Stockholm drawings is the purity of Mary's profile emphasized, something he improved in a larger study now in the collection at Chatsworth.
