Putti Playing with Hoops (Cartoon for a Fresco in Parma Cathedral)

In this rare, monumental cartoon (full-scale drawing), a group of pleasingly plump children arranged in a friezelike composition plays with hoops. The outlines of the figures are pricked with small holes, indicating the transfer of the design by means of pouncing, a technique by which the perforated outlines are rubbed with charcoal dust. This leaves a dotted outline on the underlying surface that can serve as the guideline for a painting or another drawing. A sometime collaborator of Correggio and Parmigianino, Anselmi used this cartoon to paint the decorative border of a fresco on the vault of the south transept of the Parma Cathedral in 1548. His manner of drawing is bold and expressive, with some visibly rough strokes of hatching in the modeling, as the design was meant to be seen from a distance rather than inspected at close range. The decoration currently adorning the transept, executed in tempera in 1768, is the work of Antonio Bresciani assisted by Gaetano Ghidetti, however, the entire design of the eighteenth-century vault must have been based on Anselmi's then presumably very damaged frescoes. Following Anselmi's death, the decoration of the vault was completed in its counterpart in the north transept around 1570 by Orazio Samacchini, by whom the Museum owns a design for one of the spandrels (no. 1971.66.6).