* Giuseppe Cesari, called Cavaliere d'Arpino Arpino or Rome 1568 - 1640 Rome

This finished red chalk study of the figure of Adam, seated holding the apple while looking to his left, perhaps relates to the artist's enchanting fresco in the riquadro of the Galleria on the first floor of the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati (fig.1).  Cavaliere d' Arpino was commissioned by Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini to decorate the gallery with three riquadri representing the story of Adam and Eve, and also to paint other unrelated programs of frescoes in the two adjoining rooms.  The iconography was devised with the assistance of Cardinal Silvio Antoniano, and there survives a document of October 1601 in which the Cardinal presented his suggestions to Aldobrandini.  Arpino received monthly payments for his work, beginning on 23 July 1602 and ending in January 1603.  Only two drawings unquestionably connected with the decoration of the gallery are known: the first, for the figure of God the Father in the first riquadro, is in the Louvre (inv.2965), while the second, a study of the figures of Adam and Eve for the last riquadro (The Expulsion from the Paradise), is in the Kunsthaus, Zürich (inv.56/I) (see H. Röttgen, Il Cavalier Giuseppe Cesari d' Arpino, Rome 2002, cat. nos. 105h and 105i, both illustrated, together with the frescoes, on p. 341).