Studies of male and female nudes, a satyr, and a camel (recto); Statue of Marcus Aurelius (verso)

Cherubino Alberti was the most gifted artist among a family of artists that included his father Alberto and two brothers Alessandro and Giovanni. The family workshop was established in Rome in 1566. The sheet is a tour de force of different drawing techniques and materials, as the artist deftly switches between pen and ink, brown wash, red chalk, and black chalk. The many figures on the recto were initially sketched in using black chalk, before the draftsman worked up certain figures with additional pen and ink or brown wash layers. He most likely began in the center with the child grasping a wolf, now barely discernible below the seated male figure’s torso. Cherubino’s debt to Michelangelo’s type of heroic male nude in general and his black chalk figure studies in particular is obvious and deep. The verso of the sheet is dominated by a single, highly finished study of the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, a larger-than-life-size bronze statue that during Cherubino’s lifetime was displayed in the Piazza del Campidoglio on top of the Capitoline Hill. Then, as now, it was one of the most famous images of Roman antiquity.