This monumental design can be convincingly attributed to one of the most gifted Flemish sculptors of the seventeenth century, Artus Quellinus the Younger, based on a comparison with a drawing at the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (inv. KKSgb5291; see F. Baudouin in Tekeningen uit de 17e en 18e eeuw. De verzameling Van Herck, Brussels, 2000, p. 39, ill. p. 41). This latter sheet, the verso of which is inscribed, signed and dated 1665 by the artist, can be considered one of the few secure works on paper by his hand. Although its technique differs from that of the present sheet, the angular facial features of the women, the more rounded ones of the putti, and the decisiveness of the white heightening are closely related. If the drawing offered here can be dated around the same time as the Copenhagen sheet, it dates from after Quellinus’s extended sojourns in Italy and Amsterdam, where he was responsible for the extensive sculptural decoration of Amsterdam’s new town hall. The drawing may have been the design for a funerary monument, comparable to the statue of Saint Rosa of Lima holding the Christ Child in the Sint-Pauluskerk in Antwerp, dated 1665-1670 (P. Philippot and D. Vautier in P. Philippot et al., L’Architecture religieuse et la sculpture baroques dans les Pays-Bas meridionaux et la Principauté de Liège, 1600-1700, Brussels, 2003, pp. 397, 398, fig. 2). Similar sculptures of the Virgin and Child by Quellinus can be found in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk in Sint-Truiden (the artist’s birthplace), and the Sint-Lambertuskerk in Heist-op-den-Berg.