Gifts come in many forms at this time of the year and one of the nicest is sharing lunch and a museum visit with someone special. There are few venues more gracious than the Frick Art & Historical Center, which has debuted an exhibition of 70 splendid drawings from the Prado, most of them never seen outside the esteemed Madrid museum.

"From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracci: A Century of Italian Drawings From the Prado" includes studies for commissioned works and sketches that captured a moment, made between 1520 and 1620. Sketches perhaps, but not doodles on napkins; the featured artists were consummate draftsmen, deft with pen and chalk and attentive to detail.

Curator Nicholas Turner begins his catalog introduction with the declaration that "The sixteenth century in Italy is one of the most important periods in the development of European drawing."

Following the cultural and economic blossoming of the Renaissance, art patronage escalated in both the private and ecclesiastical sectors. Artists used drawing as a preparatory tool but also realized the medium's value as a means of spontaneous expression.

'From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracci: A Century of Italian Drawings From the Prado'

Where: Frick Art & Historical Center, 7227 Reynolds St., Point Breeze.

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays (closed Christmas and New Year's Day).

Information: Admission and parking are free; 412-371-0600 or www.TheFrickPittsburgh.org.

Michelangelo is included in the title because his name is magic (like Van Gogh in an Impressionist show), but also because of the influence he had on the artists who followed him. His two exhibited drawings are figure studies for his Sistine Chapel "Last Judgement."

"Study of a Man's Right Arm Hanging Down, with the Index Finger Extended" explores the musculature of a human arm as some artists would the hills and valleys of a landscape. Of the other, "Study of a Man's Right Shoulder, Breast and Upper Arm," curator Turner writes, "The energy of these marks, variably accented, is Michelangelo's unique graphic handwriting, as powerful as one would expect from an artist of his stature."

If these two small sketches, shown with a "Sheet of Studies of Faces in Profile to the Left" attributed to his studio, make for a somewhat diminutive Michelangelo presence, the remaining 67 drawings more than compensate.

For example Giorgio Vasari's intricate "Saint Luke Painting the Virgin," circa 1568-1572, is a preparatory drawing for a fresco in Santa Annunziata chapel, Florence. Although described in the New Testament as a physician, Luke was generally believed to have been a painter and was designated patron saint of painters. He is shown at easel painting an apparition of the Virgin surrounded by putti (pudgy, winged infants) and holding the Christ Child, while three figures look on.

Note that this drawing, and some of the others, is "squared" for transfer, or over-marked with a grid, a device that facilitated enlargement or transfer to another surface.

Turner makes good argument that painter, architect and writer Vasari appears as the subject in an ink, wash and chalk drawing by Federico Zuccaro, as the honoree of Pope Pius V in "A Dignitary Kneeling Before a Pope, Receiving a Chain of Office and Other Rewards."

The Italian drawings were part of a bequest to the Prado in 1931 from collector and aristocrat Pedro Fernandez Duran, and it is only through Turner's comprehensive investigations and cataloging that the works and artists have been "rediscovered."

Turner is a specialist in Renaissance and Baroque drawings and was earlier with the J. Paul Getty Museum and the British Museum. He straightforwardly evaluates the Prado drawings in his introduction to the comprehensive, finely illustrated exhibition catalog, which also reproduces the 517 nonexhibited 16th-century Italian drawings in the museum's collection, thus serving as a catalog raisonne (available to peruse in the galleries, or $54.95, paper).

While he writes that the Prado holdings are modest in quantity and in quality compared to those of the great European collections and lack examples by luminaries such as Raphael and Titian, Turner cites many notable highlights. Among the latter are the Michelangelos, the Vasari, a "Study for a Draped Female Figure" by Andrea del Sarto and Veronese's "The Evangelist St. Luke and Other Studies."

He also praises "Studies for a Section of Architectural Decoration" (with, on reverse, "Studies of Putti, Ancient Terms and a Feigned Colonnade") by Annibale Carracci, the other exhibition title artist. The Carracci family academy in Bologna is credited with creating the Baroque style, a rejection of Mannerist exaggeration that favored a return to the naturalism celebrated in the Renaissance.

One of the more fanciful drawings is Jacopo Ligozzi's "A Chimera," a mythological creature that is a combination of lion, goat and dragon. The definition given each animal attests to Ligozzi's accomplishments as painter but also as scientific draftsman.

"Fantastic Composition, with a Cockerel, a Lion and a Snake," one of six small bronzes from the Frick's permanent collection displayed at the exhibition entry, recalls the chimera. Acquired by Henry Clay Frick from the John Pierpont Morgan collection in 1916 and given to the Frick Art Museum upon its opening in 1970 by Helen Clay Frick, the sculptures nicely complement the drawings.