Provenance

John, Lord Northwick (1770-1859), Northwick Park, by inheritance to

Capt. E.G. Spencer-Churchill

Sale: London, Sotheby’s, 1 November 1920, lot 47 (as Ludovico Carracci), 25s. to

A. P. Oppé (1878-1957), London

Thence by descent

Exhibitions

London, Royal Academy, Seventeenth Century, 1938, cat. no. 384 (as Ludovico Carracci)

London, Wildenstein Gallery, 17th Century Artists working in Rome, 1955, cat. no. 22, illustrated

Bologna, Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio, Mostra dei Carracci, 1956, cat. no. 106 (as Annibale Carracci)

London, Royal Academy, The Paul Oppé Collection, 1958, cat. no. 375 (as Annibale Carracci)

Ottawa, The National Gallery of Canada, Exhibition of Works from the Paul Oppé Collection, 1961, cat. no. 114 (as Annibale Carracci)

Literature

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

This vibrant sheet, added only recently to the corpus of the Roman settecento artist Marco Benefial, is a study for the figure of a man on crutches at the far right of his Saint Lawrence Healing the Blind and the Lame (fig. 1), in Viterbo Cathedral. The painting was part of a cycle dedicated to the Lives of Saints Lawrence, Stephen, Rose and John the Baptist, commissioned from Benefial by the Bishop of Viterbo, Adriano Sermattei, in the first half of the 1720s. While most of the Cathedral’s interior decoration was destroyed in an air raid in 1944, the painting related to our drawing is still in situ. Oil bozzetti for all the canvases in the cycle, both extant and lost, also survive and are preserved in the collection of the Cassa di Risparmio at Viterbo.

PRIVATE COLLECTION, NEW YORK