In accordance with Mosaic law, the infant Jesus was taken to the temple to be circumcised and named eight days after he was born (Luke 2: 21). Brusasorci here shows the precocious infant passively submitting to the operation, gently supported by Joseph, while the Virgin Mary perches rather awkwardly on the steps before the altar. Testifying to the significance of the event — the first occasion on which the Redeemer shed blood are two child angels above, one of whom holds a wreath of victory. The brief gospel account provides no justification for the host of witnesses crammed into the interior, among whom the monumental foreground figures bearing a torch and a censer lend a touch of authenticity and atmosphere to the scene.

The fact that this highly finished, painterly drawing bears the date 1547 makes it a particularly useful point of reference for the oeuvre of an artist for whom we have few securely datable works. The elaborate technique and high degree of finish might lead one to conclude that this drawing was conceived as a finished work in its own right; if preparatory for a painting, one has the impression from the densely packed composition that this would have been a small scale work. No painting of this subject by Brusasorci is known or recorded in the early sources.

The drawing illustrates well Brusasorci's rather eclectic style, grafting as it does elements derived from Mantuan and Emilian mannerism — notably the figure types of the high priest and the Virgin and from contemporary Venetian art, onto a core rooted in the art of his native Verona. It compares particularly well painting of the Attempted Healing of a Possessed Boy (San Giorgio in Braida, Verona), for which a date of about 1545-7 is widely accepted. The highly wrought execution of this drawing, in which all of the contours and outlines are very precisely defined in dark ink, is typical of Brusasorci's more elaborate, modello-type drawings, among them the other sheet by him Edinburgh (The Coronation of the Virgin, with the Apostles at her Tomb, D 5484), the compositional  study at Chatsworth for his altarpiece in Sant'Eufemia, Verona, and a drawing of Christ appearing to St Thomas (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), which has not to my knowledge hitherto been associated with Brusasorci but is certainly by him.

During conservation treatment, infrared examination of the drawing revealed that the torch-bearer at the lower left was originally shown bearded and in near profile, in which guise he would have resembled quite closely the apostle with a large book in the left foreground of the Attempted Healing of a Possessed Boy.

This text was first published in The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art From Scottish Collections (2004).