A painting in the National Museum in Copenhagen showing four children belonging to the nobility [Fig. 1] has been till now ascribed to an anonymous artist working in Denmark. In reality this interesting work must have originated in Haarlem, in the close circle of Frans Hals. It presents an early, totally unknown stage of a formal development, when Hals and his circle broke with the hitherto rigid mode of depicting stiffly standing children. This evolution line culminated some years later in the famous painting by Frans Hals Children of the van Campen Family (1623-1625, Brussels). A precise attribution of the Copenhagen painting does not seem possible at the moment. We would like to ascribe it to an unknown Haarlem painter close to Hals and active in the years 1610-1620. The work might have been bought in 1626 by the Danish nobleman Eiler Bille in Holland and brought to the manor in Nakkeb & oslash;lle (South Funen) from where it ultimately entered the collections of the Nationalmuseet in 1929.
This essay begins by presenting and analyzing two paintings and several drawings by Palma il Giovane, several of which may be situated in the early 1580s, the most interesting period of the artist's long career; they highlight lesser-known aspects of his production. In two sketches, Palma's very first ideas for his large oval of Victory Crowning Venice for the Doge's Palace in Venice (1579/1580), we notice the artist's apparently unpremeditated use of the pen, as if he were thinking spontaneously on paper while considering solutions for the task at hand. A study for the Vision of Saint John the Evangelist is of a slightly later date, when Palma did not yet seem to be certain about the evangelist's position in regard to his painting's placement in the new albergo of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista. The artist's Martyrdom of Saints Hermagoras and Fortunatus representing a rather rare theme should also be placed in this phase. I suggest that it was meant to serve as the panel of a polyptych or the shutter of a small organ. Other preparatory studies can be placed in a later moment: a sheet from the 1590s linked with one of the falling figures in the altarpiece of the Martyrdom of Saint Catherine in the church of the Frari; and another of intense pathos for Saint Cecilia at the Organ, which Palma inventively transformed with a basic structural change into the Suicide of Lucretia on canvas. Finally, the essay presents a pen study relating to the Et & agrave; del Ferro commissioned by Alexander I Pico for his palace in Mirandola, a work taking us to 1609 and Palma's career in the Stati estens
