Saint John the Baptist preaching in the Wilderness

The rapid chalk underdrawing and the free and fluid pen work, worked up in red wash, are characteristic of Molinari's drawings. Until Richard Green's article on a group of Molinari drawings in Düsseldorf, published in 1984, Molinari was fairly unknown as a draughtsman ('Molinari Drawings in Düsseldorf', Master Drawings, XXII, 1984, no. 2, pp. 194-205, plates 29a-41). Two years after this article, Catherine Monbeig Goguel published a group of 40 Molinari drawings in the Louvre, a number of which are stylistically close to the present sheet ('Drawings by Antonio Molinari in the Louvre', Master Drawings, XXIII, 1986, no. 2, pp. 232-41, plates 40-51).