The Deposition

Professor Rearick, in the exhibition catalogue of 1988, dates the drawing to late 1575-early 1576 by comparison with a drawing in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kassel, of Studies of Venice enthroned. The latter composition is related to a picture of the same subject painted for the Anticamera of the Sala del Collegio in the Palazzo Ducale, Venice, finished by February 1576, R. Cocke, Veronese's Drawings, London, 1984, no. 83. Professor Rearick refers to another drawing close in handling and of a similar date to the present one, of Studies for the four Allegories of Love in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, connected to the four pictures commissioned by Emperor Rudolph II in the 1560s and now in the National Gallery, London, R. Cocke, op. cit., no. 78. Close in handling and also in type of composition is a sheet of studies of Judith and Holofernes, Judith and Goliath formerly in the Hirsch collection in Basel, drawn on the verso of a letter dated 1582, R. Cocke, op. cit., no. 99.
The main source for the composition of the present drawing seems to have been Titian's picture of the same subject, now in the Prado, Madrid, F. Valcanove, L'opera completa di Tiziano, Milan, 1969, no. 467. The picture was described by Vasari as still being in Titian's studio in 1566 where Veronese might have seen it.
In the 1540s Veronese had painted a Deposition (Venice, op. cit., no. 51), though of a different composition. The drawing might correspond to a lost picture which is described in 1680 in the Palazzo Farnesiano in Parma: 'Un Cristo posto nel sepolcro da Nicomedo; si vede alla parte sinistra la Madonna, Santa Maria Maddalena scapigliata con le mani gionte et due altre figure, di Paolo Veronese', T. Pignatti, Veronese, Venice, 1976, p. 235. Indeed, the larger sketch shows two kneeling figures on the left of Christ and is supported by two figures, similarly to the lost picture, with a third sketched in.