Marco Benefial

John, Lord Northwick (1770-1859),    
by inheritance at Northwick Park,
to Capt. E.G. Spencer-Churchill, 
sale, London, Sotheby's, 1 November 1920, lot 47 (as Ludovico Carracci),
purchased at the sale by Paul Oppé (25 s.)

London, Royal Academy, Seventeenth Century, 1938, no. 384 (as Ludovico Carracci);
London, Wildenstein Gallery, 17th Century Artists working in Rome, 1955, no. 22, reproduced;
Bologna, Palazzo dell'Archiginnasio, Mostra dei Carracci, 1956, no. 106 (as Annibale Carracci);
London, Royal Academy, The Paul Oppé Collection, 1958, no. 375 (as Annibale Carracci)
Ottawa, The National Gallery of Canada, Exhibition of Works from the Paul Oppé Collection, 1961, no. 114 (as Annibale Carracci)

D. Posner, Annibale Carracci, London 1971, p. 37 (as Annibale Carracci)

Laid down. Overall in good condition. There are some faint yellow stains at the upper section near his head and some located at the lower section of the sheet - these are hardly visible. Blue paper has retained its colour and black chalk is strong.
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This newly recognised preparatory drawing by the Roman settecento artist Marco Benefial (1684-1764) is a study for the figure of a man on crutches at the far right of his painting of St. Lawrence Healing the Blind and the Lame (fig. 1), in Viterbo Cathedral.  The painting was commissioned as part of a cycle of works depicting The Lives of St Lawrence, Stephen, Rose and John the Baptist, in the first half of the 1720s.  Much of the cathedral’s interior was destroyed in an allied air raid in 1944, but the painting relating to the present drawing still survives in situ, and all the compositions, surviving and lost, also live on in a series of bozzetti that are housed in the Cassa di Risparmio di Viterbo.

A compositional drawing, preparatory for the same painting of St. Lawrence, is in the Albertina in Vienna.¹  This finished drawing, executed in black and white chalk, has been described by Van Dooren as the modello used for the final painting.  In the Albertina drawing too, we clearly see the connection between our study and the identically posed man on crutches at the right of the composition.  Other than the present sheet, the only known full-scale figure study for this important cycle is a nude 'dal modello', in Berlin, which Benefial used for the figure of St. Lawrence, in the painting of St. Lawrence giving Communion.²  As Van Dooren observed in his 2008 study of the artist’s drawings, Benefial was trained in the Roman-Bolognese tradition, and executed all seventy or so of his known figure studies in chalk, works that are very consistent in style and quality with the Oppé sheet. 

Further red chalk studies survive in Berlin for the other paintings in the cycle, freer and more loosely rendered than the two large-scale studies of individual figures, possibly indicating they formed part of the earlier stages in the compositional process.³  The Oppé study is an important addition to the drawings for this series and provides more information about Benefial's creative processes as a draughtsman.

Like all the artists of his generation in Rome, Benefial was highly influenced by the work of the Carracci, and when it was in the Northwick Collection this fine and robust black chalk figure study was indeed attributed Ludovico Carracci.  After this, Bodmer gave it to Annibale, an attribution supported by Posner and Mahon, suggesting that it was a rejected study for the man on the right side of Annibale's Saint Roch altarpiece, but in the final painting the man is pushing a barrow. 

^1. K. Van Dooren, 'The Drawings of Marco Benefial', Master Drawings, vol. 46, no. 1, 2008, p. 66, fig. 8

^2. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. no. KdZ 15858; Van Dooren, op. cit.,p. 74, reproduced fig. 27, p. 89, note 59 

^3. Van Dooren, op. cit., p. 67, figs. 9 and 10