Three Angels making Music, after Correggio

A drawing by the same hand after Correggio's Saint John the Baptist, copying one of the pendentives of the Cupola of the Parma Cathedral is at the British Museum, A.E. Popham, Italian Drawings, Artists working in Parma in the sixteenth Century, 1967, London, no. 21, unillustrated. A.E. Popham agreed that it could be the work of the Carracci school. Later he identified a double-sided drawing now in the Galleria Estense, Modena, which copies figures from Correggio's Cupola as by Annibale Carracci, which is executed in the same technique, C. Robertson, Annibale Carracci and Invenzione: Medium and Function in the early drawings, Master Drawings, 1997, XXXV, figs. 29 and 30. The old inscription at the bottom of the present sheet seems to date from the same period as that on a drawing of a Standing Robed Figure in red chalk formerly in the Morelli collection and now in the Castello Sforzesco, Milan, C. Robertson, op. cit., fig. 28.
The present copy is faithful to the original except in one detail: the head of the angel on the upper left looking forward has a different expression from that in the fresco in which he looks askance at the foot of the Virgin pressing on his shoulder.