The Risen Christ

The resurrected Jesus Christ stands solidly on the ground before a plain background. He raises his right hand in blessing and holds a staff with a banner in his left; billowing draperies envelop his body. Montagna rendered the figure with sculptural dimensionality, using the point of a brush to delicately model the torso and face, with attention paid to the dangling ringlets of centrally parted hair. Long, richly-blended strokes create the dense folds of cloth, which variously hang and flutter. At some point in the succeeding centuries, the drawing was trimmed at the top, and the cross on the tip of the banner’s staff was cut out and pasted a little lower down. Montagna used his drawings as a studio resource from which to derive his painted compositions, and this sheet is typical in that it relates to at least two different paintings. Principally it was used for a Risen Christ now in Schwerin (Staatliche Museum, inv. G.716), which shares an almost identical figure, but it was also adapted for a Saint John the Baptist in the Desert now in Ravenna (Pinacoteca, inv. 1994.60).