The drawing belongs to a collection, mostly by Cambiaso´s workshop, formerly preserved in an old album. According to Renaissance tradition, a painter needed to prove himself as an inventor of figure compositions: these were not the casual groupings of scenes from everyday life that might take his fancy, but the great actions of human history, from the Bible, mythology, ancient history and literature. The painter, like the poet, needed to stir human emotion, which he did by interpreting traditional stories afresh, eliciting thereby the admiration of his contemporaries.

This fundamental art-theoretical tenet of the time, coupled with Cambiaso´s position as leader of the most important painters´ studio in Genoa, helps explain his significant production of finished compositional drawings. Far from helping solve problems that had arisen in the long preparatory process leading to the creation of a specific painting or paintings, they seem to have come into being as a result of a process of fostering artistic invention and may well have had a didactic purpose. They show the painter cultivating his own ideas in the orchestration of a given theme. Cambiaso´s sequence of drawings dedicated to Stories from Christ´s Passion, of which the present study is a fine example, must have come about as a result of such an exercise. The fact that so many drawn compositions devoted to these Stories are known, often from a number of versions of varying quality and often without a single corresponding pictorial rendering, would seem to bear out this hypothesis.

The Prado drawing well conveys the movement of a crowd of soldiers, caught in a moment of great excitement. The agitated movements of the soldiers are complimented by the bowed and humiliated figure of Christ, bundled along by his captors. As the eye moves further back into space into greater darkness, the movement of the soldiers slows. The sense of spectacle provided by this nocturnal event is enhanced by the single source of illumination, the torch held aloft by the lead soldier on the left. The flickering torchlight provides a fitting accompaniment to the sudden movements of the figures in the main group, while the darkness of the background is equally appropriate to the slower progress of the rest (Text drawn from Turner, N.: From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracci. A century of Italian drawings from the Prado, Art Services International-Museo Nacional del Prado, 2008, p. 110).