On an annual pilgrimage of the holy family to Jerusalem for Passover the twelve-year-old child got lost and found again after three days in a temple debating with scholars executing His Father's business.

The subject had already been treated by Dürer in a panel of the Seven Sorrows Polyptych (1494–1497) executed by his workshop, and about ten years later in a woodcut of the Life of the Virgin series.

[3] Not until his second journey to Italy Dürer made detailed studies after living models before he worked out a final composition for paintings and engravings alike.

[4][5] The first preparatory drawings originate in Venice, all in the same technique: dark ink drawn with a brush, highlighted with white tempera, on large sheets of Venetian blue dyed paper (carta azzurra).

The blue color serves as a middle tone, a method he formerly applied in the Green Passion of 1504, and in drawings where he washed the background around the figures to obtain the same effect.

[11] In fact, it is made "in an almost impromptu fashion, a thin coat of color being applied in broad and fluid strokes utterly different from Dürer's normally meticulous brushwork," as Erwin Panofsky described it.

[13] Copies of the panel in Germany from around 1600 serve as evidence that the image was known north of the Alps, so that Dürer might have brought the painting back with him to Nuremberg.

He produced the picture in this indeed rather short time to finish an oil painting, so that it was worth the inscription, probably due to the fact, that he prominently had to work on the Feast of the Rosary, commissioned by the German community in Venice residing at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi for their church (which brought him immediate fame that also radiated back to Nuremberg).

[17] Opposing the two paintings reveals two kinds of work, done in different "modes of creation", the certainly more accomplished altarpiece was meticulously planned and executed, while the other was done swiftly following an instant inspiration, like a stroke of a genius.

[19] He was well aware of his exceptional talent already at an early age and it is surely the main motivation behind his trademark monogram, besides his copyright concerns related to his printed work.

So he stands steadfast in the central axis of the picture contemplating his arguments and counting them off on his fingers, while the doctors keep to the books in their hands ready to cite from them.

The man on the lower left with a cartouche on his beret, a customary depiction of the Pharisees,[20] on the contrary has closed his book and begins to pay attention trying to fathom the Child's arguments.

These two pairs of hands form a kind of ornament in the center of the picture (in fact, slightly off), summarizing the panel's theme in an abstract way.

[24] The display of the grotesque was seen everywhere in northern medieval culture, from the gargoyles and capitals of the great cathedrals to the tableaux vivants, the open-air mystery plays and comedic theatre with their amateur actors grimacing and distorting their bodies, that inspired artists to adopt them primarily for miniatures in illuminated texts.

The conception of a composition with several half-figures (maximal height) in a neutral dark space was introduced by Andrea Mantegna, but may be traced back to reliefs by Donatello.

At the time Dürer arrived in Venice in the summer of 1505, Bellini's San Zaccaria Altarpiece was erected and surely was an event talked about not only in artists circles.

Dürer paid homage to him by incorporating the figure of the single lute-playing angel sitting in front of Mary's throne into his Feast of the Rosary.

Both Presentation panels of Mantegna and Bellini have all personage and the beholder on almost equal height, whereas Dürer had tilted the ground plane resulting in a perspectival view from slightly above seemingly to gain depth of space and rectify the overcrowded scene.

"[36] Maybe this was caused by the short time he spend on it, or he purposefully aimed for a contrasting statement against the Venetian sense for calmness and harmonic composition, as well as his own Feast of the Rosary.

He left Mary and Joseph out of the picture and concentrated the image on the theological debate, emphasised by the traditional motif of hands enumerating points on the fingers (computus digitalis).

And the personage, whose diversity is illustrated by their clothes, form a half-circle around the Christ Child, already generating a deeper space than the panels by Mantegna and Bellini.