The Madonna and Child with the Infant Baptist, with subsidiary studies of the Infants and of the Madonna's hands

Dr David Ekserdjian and Professor Giulio Bora have both kindly confirmed the attribution to Gatti. Despite the carefully worked out subsidiary drawings and the squaring in red chalk, no painting by Gatti of this composition is known, although Professor Bora points to close similarities with a mother and child in the lower right of Gatti's fresco of The Feeding of the Five Thousand in the refectory of San Pietro al Po, Cremona (M. Gregori et al., Pittura a Cremona dal Romantico al Settecento, Milan, 1990, p. 268).
Although traditionally thought to be a pupil of Correggio, Gatti was already an established painter in Pavia and Cremona before he arrived in Parma. His drawings have in the past been confused with those of Correggio's pupil Giorgio Gandini, although the relationship between the latter's emphatic linearity and Gatti's softer style as shown in the present drawing has since been demonstrated by Konrad Oberhuber (K. Oberhuber, Review of A.E. Popham, Italian Drawings ... in the British Museum, Artists working in Parma, London, 1967, in Master Drawings, 1970, 3, pp. 281-2.
Drawings by Gatti are in the Getty Museum, Malibu (G.R. Goldner, European Drawings 1, Catalogue of the Collections, Malibu, 1988, no. 14, formerly at Chatsworth; Christie's, London, 3 July 1984, lot 15), three others remaining at Chatsworth, Jaffé 800, 802, 80 and formerly in the collection of Alfred Normand; Christie's, Monaco, 20 June 1994, lot 10.