Daniele Crespi

Although Daniele Crespi was among the most gifted draughtsmen working in Milan in the 1620s, only about seventy drawings by him are known. Unusually for a Lombard artist of his generation, almost all of his extant drawings appear to be preparatory studies for paintings or frescoes. No independent, finished drawings by the artist seem to have survived, however.

The recto of this large drawing is a study for the arm of Saint John the Baptist in Crespi’s lunette fresco of Saint Hugh of Grenoble Blessing the First Carthusian Monastery in the Valley of Chartreusein the Certosa di Garegnano, outside Milan. Painted near the end of the artist’s brief career, the fresco is one of a series of six lunette scenes from the life of Saint Bruno that were part of the extensive decoration executed by Crespi between 1627 and 1629 on the nave and vault of the monastery church at Garegnano. Two further preparatory studies by the artist for the fresco of Saint Hugh of Grenoble Blessing the Monastery are known. A study in pen and ink for the entire lunette composition is in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, while a drawing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York depicts the figures of John the Baptist, King David and other heavenly witnesses seated in clouds above the main scene. A closely comparable drawing of the Risen Christ, likewise drawn in black chalk on blue paper, is in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, and is a preparatory study for another fresco at Garegnano.

As the Crespi scholar Nancy Ward Neilson has noted, the painter derived the motif of St. John the Baptist and King David in clouds witnessing the blessing of the monastery from an engraving of the same subject designed by Giovanni Lanfranco. Part of a series of twenty scenes from the life of Saint Bruno engraved by Dietrich Theodore Kruger and dated to between 1620 and 1621, Lanfranco’s designs were adapted by Crespi for a number of other frescoes at the Certosa di Garegnano.

The studies of arms and shoulders drawn in pen and ink on the verso of the present sheet have been tentatively related to a painting of Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist, thought to be one of Crespi’s earliest known works, which appeared at auction in New York in 1993. A similar sheet of Studies of Arms is on the verso of a drawing by Crespi in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana.