Giovanni Lanfranco

This broadly and vigorously executed, double-sided sheet is highly characteristic of Lanfranco’s individual graphic style, with its bold, strong strokes of black chalk, heightened with white chalk, and typical use of blue paper.  The mise-en-page, combining various studies, is also comparable with many other sheets by the artist. On the recto, the study of the face of a young man looking down, surely drawn from life, can be closely compared to a very similar head, most likely that of the same model, but shown looking upwards, in a drawing now in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.¹  The sheet in Capodimonte was associated by Raffaello Causa to The Martyrdom of St. John, part of Lanfranco’s fresco decoration for the church of the SS. Apostoli, Naples (1638-1646).²  The studies on the present sheet do not, however, seem to be related to this same scene. 

There are also certain stylistic similarities with two other sheets at Capodimonte,³ both preparatory for the figure of St. Sebastian in the earlier painting by Lanfranco of St. Sebastian in Glory, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (fig. 1).⁴  The head in the present sheet is quite similar to that of St. Sebastian in the Houston painting, which is dated by Schleier to around 1634, just before Lanfranco's departure for Naples, to start work on the fresco decorations in the Gesù Nuovo (1634-5).  The painting appears in the 1644 inventory of the Cardinal Antonio Baberini, but it is not certain if it was he who commissioned it.

^1. Naples, Museo di Capodimonte, inv. no. GDS 973;

^2. R. Causa, Disegni di Lanfranco per la Chiesa dei Santi Apostoli nel Museo di Capodimonte, exhib. cat., Naples, Museo di Capodimonte, 1964, p. 24, no. 38, fig. 9

^3. Naples, Museo di Capodimonte, inv. nos. GDS 542 and GDS 482; E. Schleier, Disegni di Lanfranco (1582-1647), exhib. cat., Florence, Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, 1983, pp. 160-1, nos. XXXIIa, XXXIIb, reproduced respectively figs. 151, 150

^4. Idem, Giovanni Lanfranco, Un pittore barocco tra Parma Roma e Napoli, Milan 2001, p. 276, no. 82, reproduced p. 277