Saint Joseph

This Saint Joseph is not one of Perugino's panels but a drawing on paper, made around 1473 when he was still a young man in Florence. In those years he was working in the city's busy painters' workshops, where drawing was the daily training, sheets worked up in careful strokes and then kept as models or thrown away. Very few of these early studies survive, which is part of why this one is held apart in the Uffizi's cabinet of drawings and prints rather than hung in the painting galleries. It studies the single standing figure of Joseph, the kind of quiet exercise through which a beginner learned to give a body weight and character.