Provenance

Private collection, France

W. M. Brady & Co., New York, 2012

Mr. and Mrs. Seymour R. Askin, Jr., Greenwich, Connecticut

By descent

Exhibitions

New York, W. M. Brady & Co., Master Drawings, 1530-1920, 24 January-3 February,  2012, cat. no. 14, illustrated

Greenwich, Bruce Museum, Greenwich Collects: Wyeth, Italian Drawings, Chinese Antiquities, 6 July-31 August 2014, without catalogue

Paolo Gerolamo Piola’s upbringing in Genoa in the last quarter of the seventeenth century had all the ingredients for a successful career. His father, Domenico, had built a formidable and highly prolific workshop, generally referred to as the Casa Piola, which included, among others, his brothers Pellegro and Giovanni Andrea, his three sons Paolo Gerolamo, Anton Maria, and Giovanni Battista, and also his two sons-in-law, Gregorio de’ Ferrari and Domenico Parodi. Together they dominated the market for grand fresco decorations, executing the most prestigious commissions for the Genoese nobility and the churches in and around the city. The Casa Piola was largely responsible for establishing Genoa as the leading city for such decorations, second perhaps only to Rome where, however, many Genoese artists lived, most prominently Giovanni Battista Gaulli (1639-1709), who had settled there in circa 1657.

Born into such a successful family business, Paolo Gerolamo spent most of his career in Genoa, initially developing a style closely based on his father’s. In 1690, however, under the patronage of the Marchese Niccolò Maria Pallavicini (1650-1714), he transferred to Rome to study with Carlo Maratti. The four years he spent there had an enormous impact on his style and compositions, which generally gained in clarity. He successfully blended Maratti’s classical figures with his Genoese sense of rhythmic draperies and bright colors applied in a rather ornamental fashion. The result was a lighter, brighter, and more refined style, perfectly suited to meet the needs of his elevated clientele. Upon his father’s death in 1703, he assumed the responsibility for the workshop which he headed until his premature death in 1724.

Highly finished in pen and wash, with rich white heightening typical of the artist’s technique, our drawing belongs to his last decade, when he was at the height of his powers. It was certainly made in view of a chapel decoration, either for an altarpiece or, more likely, a large fresco. Though not apparently connected with any known or documented work, the drawing’s figure style and elongated composition - the narrative is set within a vast and steeply receding architecture below a wide-open celestial arena populated with angels - is extremely close in style and imagery to two chapel decorations that Piola worked on between 1718 and the year of his death.

The first, the Cappella della Torre in the Church of Nostra Signora della Consolazione, Genoa, dated 1718, is one of the city’s most lavishly decorated chapels. More specifically, our drawing is particularly close to the large fresco of Christ Handing the Keys to St. Peter in that chapel. A finished drawing for this fresco, identical in size and executed in the same technique as ours, is recorded in a private collection, Genoa.¹  Similarly, nearly identical figure types and a closely comparable compositional layout can be found in the fresco of Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, painted from 1722 in the Church of Santa Marta. It seems quite conceivable that our drawing may have been initially intended for either of these chapels or a similar project, such as the drawing of Christ and the Woman of Samaria in the print room of the Palazzo Rosso, Genoa.²  Again, identical to ours in size, technique, style, and date, this sheet, too, is not connected with any known work. Yet as Mary Newcome has pointed out, few of Paolo Gerolamo’s drawings are preparatory in a strict sense,³  and he may well have made this drawing for his own pleasure or that of close friends.