A pen and ink drawing of The Adoration of the Shepherds, created as a preparatory study for the fourteen panel polyptych on the main altar of San Leopardo Cathedral, Osimo. A study of a woman’s head in profile in the upper right of the sheet. Inscribed in later hand along the lower edge ‘Novelara’. Stamped in the lower left corner with an Edward VII blind stamp.

Previously attributed to the school of Carracci, this drawing has since been recognized as by the Mannerist artist Battista Franco. The drawing, which shows the Adoration of the Shepherds, is an exploratory study for the nativity scene in the lower register of the fourteen panel polyptych created for the main altar of San Leopardo Catherdral, Osimo. The Royal Collection holds two further studies for the polyptych (RCIN 990222 and 990223).

Drawn rapidly, with the immediacy and agile pen and ink style characteristic of Franco’s drawings from the late 1540s and 50s, the study is close to the finished painting. Franco indicates several of his figures and the heads of the livestock in a highly abbreviated shorthand. For a wider discussion of the commission and associated preparatory drawings, see 'Battista Franco’s Osimo Polyptych and its Preparatory Drawings' Anne Varick Lauder and Hugo Chapman, (Artibus et Historiae, no. 74, XXXVII, 2016, pp. 43-58). Varick Lauder and Chapman suggest that the composition and nocturne setting of the completed painting may have been influenced by Giorgio Vasari’s 1538 painting of the Adoration of the Shepherds in the Camaldoli Monastery in the Church of S.S. Donato e Ilariano.

Born in Venice, Franco moved to Rome in his twenties where he became heavily influenced by Michelangelo (1475 – 1564). According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, engaging with drawing was central to the way in which Franco assimilated Michelangelo’s style, writing that for a while ‘Franco would do nothing but draw, and would not paint at all’ and that there was no ‘design, or sketch, nay not even a copy executed by Michelangelo’ that Franco did not copy (Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Volume 5, p.33). Franco spent the majority of his career in Rome and Urbino, only returning to Venice in the last decade of his life.