Donato CRETI

This fine drawing is a preparatory study for one of the major commissions of Donato Creti’s late career; a lost canvas of Alexander the Great and his Physician Philip that was one of a pair of paintings commissioned from the artist in 1736 by the French general André Maurice, Duc de Noailles, the other being Alexander the Great Cutting the Gordian Knot. The two paintings, for which Creti was paid the sum of 1,800 lire, were completed by July 1738 and were dispatched from Bologna to Florence in October 1738 to be sent onward to Paris. However, although the artist is known to have been paid for the two works, they never seem to have been delivered to the Duc de Noailles, and their subsequent history is a mystery. While the latter work has survived and is today in an English private collection, the painting of Alexander the Great and his Physician Philip is lost, although its composition is known through a full-size, finished oil sketch by Creti recently sold at auction and today in a private collection in Italy. Both Alexander paintings were preceded by a pair of small-scale bozzetti that were sent to the Duc de Noailles for his approval; these bozzetti – which each show evidence of workshop participation – are today in the collection of Goodwood House in West Sussex.

The present sheet is a study for the head of the soldier at the left of the composition of Alexander the Great and his Physician Philip; a figure identified as Alexander’s bodyguard Lysimachus. That Creti was particularly concerned with the head of this figure is seen in the fact that the full-scale oil sketch in a private collection shows an obvious pentiment in the profile head of the soldier, in which the artist tried two different angles for the head, both of which differ from that seen in this drawing.

This drawing appears to be dated March 1737 (‘iij 37’), in what seems to be Creti’s hand, on the verso. Such a dating would fit in with the assumed chronology of the painting, which was completed by the summer of 1738. Two other preparatory drawings by Creti for the painting of Alexander the Great and his Physician Philip are in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice.