A drawing depicting a full-length male figure riding a horse, flanked by two soldiers and surrounded by a crowd. Probably a design for a painting which has never been traced.

Antonio Gionima was perhaps the most exciting painter in Bologna in the decade before his death of tuberculosis at the age of 35. Most of his commissions seem to have been from private collectors rather than for public sites; he was thus somewhat neglected by subsequent writers, and little detail is known about the progress of his career. The son of a painter and a pupil of Aureliano Milani and Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Gionima adopted strongly expressive compositions and dramatic chiaroscuro and colour in his paintings, and an often elaborate mixing of wash and white in his drawings. He seems to have participated in the revival of interest in Mannerism among some artists in early eighteenth-century Bologna, seen here in the compositional device of placing the principal action beyond a group of large gesticulating figures in the left foreground. Gionima's drawings were esteemed in his day and this is his most beautiful surviving sheet. It seems to be a final design for a domestic painting; scenes of biblical heroism or legendary moral rectitude including the patron's likeness were a popular subject for such pictures, and Kurz's suggestion that the head of David here was destined to be a portrait may well be correct. However, no painting has been traced and nothing else is known about the project beyond a preparatory sketch for the composition, formerly in the Methuen collection and recently on the art market.

Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002