Design for a Festival Entry (detail)
by FONTANA, Giovanni Battista, Pen and brown ink, brown and gray wash, traces of red chalk, 290 x 2665 mm
This drawing is related to courtly festival designs. Its extreme length suggests that it was originally presented as a roll, used for books from antiquity onwards in Europe. Tournament descriptions were often presented in the form of rolls: this is frequently the case at the Habsburg courts of the later sixteenth century.