A lady kneeling before the Pope, who presents a scroll

As demonstrated by Catherine Monbeig Goguel in 1975, the style of Bellini is deeply rooted in Urbino, influenced by Barocci and his pupil Antonio Viviani, while his Counter Reformation themes and narratives are aligned with what Vanni and Cigoli were producing at the same time in Siena and Florence (‘Filippo Bellini da Urbino della Scuola del Baroccio’, Master Drawings, XIII, 4, 1975). Possibly showing the approval of a religious order advocated by a noblewoman, the subject of this drawing has yet to be identified. Bellini, however, did experiment with strikingly similar arrangements in his Circumcision, painted in 1595 for the Basilica of Loreto, studied on a drawing in the Accademia di San Fernando, Madrid, and this serves as a close stylistic comparison to the present sheet (Goguel, op. cit., pl. 3)

We are grateful to Catherine Monbeig Goguel for her assistance in cataloguing this drawings and for confirming the attribution to Filippo Bellini.