This drawing depicting the Education of the Virgin, with Anne emphasizing a point while embracing her devoutly attentive daughter, is an especially fresh survival of the eighteenth-century Gandolfi family's activity. Once seen as the last gasp of the city's great painters dating back to the sixteenth century, they are now recognized as independent and original, if historically-conscious, artists.(1) This author sees the drawing as the work of Ubaldo rather than his brother Gaetano or his nephew Mauro.

Ubaldo Gandolfi was born in San Matteo della Decima, ten miles northwest of Bologna, in 1728. He trained at the larger city's Accademia Clementina from 1745, where he studied under Ercole Graziani the Younger, himself a pupil of Donato Creti; Felice Torelli; and the anatomist and sculptor Ercole Lelli. Attention to the latter's teachings allowed him to gain the skills to win three medals for figure drawing in his first four years. In 1759, the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in the town of Castel San Pietro commissioned an altarpiece of the Assumption from him. This achievement marked the real start of his career, followed swiftly by his marriage and his appointment as director of figure drawing at the Accademia Clementina. Major private patrons began to support him in the late 1760s, though his portraits and depictions of saints for them did not allow him to avoid inactivity. Major mythological canvases and frescoes date from the late 1760s and 1770s. Especially in the 1770s, these commissions were supplemented by a series of altarpieces for religious communities in small towns, the kind of work that had begun his career. Principe of the Accademia Clementina in 1772, Ubaldo died suddenly in 1781 during his work on the frescoes for the cupola of San Vitale in Ravenna.

Drawings by all three Gandolfi were prized during their lifetimes. Connoisseurship was long notoriously difficult but has been greatly facilitated by the careful work of Mimi Cazort and others assessing the graphic habits of all three artists.(2) The name under which the Crocker drawing entered the collection is not recorded. By the 1930s, it was thought to be eighteenth-century German(3) and was first related to the Gandolfi family by Noel Annesley.(4) The Crocker drawing in pen and wash is loosely related to one of Ubaldo's best-known altarpieces, the Education of the Virgin for the church of San Francesco of the Minorite Friars in San Giovanni in Persiceto, painted in 1779,(5) but is not preparatory to it.

According to Cazort, a greater number of independent compositional drawings survive for Ubaldo than for either Gaetano or Mauro, "suggest[ing] that the elder brother, chronically lacking commissions, often fulfilled his creative urges and 'kept his hand in' by making drawings."(6) The Crocker Education of the Virgin may be one of these. The painting in San Giovanni in Persiceto is conceived in a different, grander format, with the Virgin standing at the top of a staircase, Anne kneeling beside her. As Joachim reads in the background, the Virgin gazes towards God the Father in the clouds above. The drawing retains the physiognomy and gestures of mother and child. Setting and intent have changed radically, however, with the seated Anne embracing her daughter, while God is represented only by light streaming from above. This domestic scale and intimate tone are accented by the oval format(7) which guides the eye to follow the curve of Anne's embrace. By transposing the altarpiece's composition into this domestic mode, Ubaldo creates a cousin to it, one whose intimacy and reduced dimensions would make an appealing focus for private devotions.

A drawing by Ubaldo in the Metropolitan Museum(8) which is preparatory to the altarpiece shares the graphic quirks evident in the Crocker drawing especially in the Virgin's head, the application of wash, and in the drapery, where Ubaldo's slight hesitation when he changes the direction of his stroke leaves distinctive pools of ink, a characteristic shared by few of Gaetano's or Mauro's own drawings. The Crocker drawing shares a bold and decisive line with other drawings by Ubaldo as well, for example the Uffizi Holy Family(9) and Diana.(10) It should be dated after the San Giovanni in Persiceto painting to the last two years of his life.

William Breazeale, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010