Castiglione’s earliest known works are pastoral landscapes, a genre that was a speciality of minor Genoese painters, and he was to return to this subject matter throughout his life. These drawings are executed in oil paint on paper, a distinctive technique that became Castiglione’s hallmark. Like all the drawings in the exhibition, they are probably finished works of art rather than studies for paintings. How (or even if) Castiglione used drawings to prepare for his paintings is uncertain: he did not work out the details of his paintings with sequences of preliminary studies, and both his oil drawings and his paintings on canvas were executed with little if any underdrawing.