Like Perino's Christ Healing the Lame at the Pool of Bethesda, this drawing is a design for one of a series of six circular plaques that were to be engraved in rock crystal and mounted on a pair of silver candelabra, commissioned by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese.
This scene depicts one of Christ's miracles, after a sermon on a mountain, when he multiplied a few loaves of bread and two fish that had been brought to him by a young boy to feed five thousand followers.
Perino del Vaga (Florence 1501–1547 Rome), Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes
, Pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white gouache, over black chalk; cut to a circle, Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1910
, I, 21