Maratta was commissioned during the 1670s to paint a series of canvases as models for mosaics in the vault of the Cappella della Presentazione in St Peter’s. This is a study for the prophet Balaam pointing to the Star of David, in one of the triangular pendentives. Work on the project dragged on for decades, and was still incomplete at Maratta’s death forty years later.

This drawing is a study for a mosaic of the prophet Balaam pointing to the Star of David, in a spandrel of the Cappella della Presentazione, the second chapel in the left aisle of St Peter’s, Rome. Maratta was commissioned sometime during the 1670s to paint canvases as models for the mosaics, above Giovanni Francesco Romanelli’s altarpiece of the Presentation of the Virgin of 1638-42 (which was itself replaced by a mosaic copy in 1728). Maratta received a first payment for two models for the pendentives in March 1684, and finished all four, depicting the prophets Aaron, Noah, Gideon and Balaam, by the following year. Fabio Cristofari began work on the mosaics in late 1683, completing the pendentives and lunettes before his death in January 1689.

There was then a break in the work until 1704, when Maratta provided five models for sections of the vault of the chapel, depicting the Coronation of the Virgin and the Defeat of the Rebel Angels (Giuseppe Conti having succeeded Cristofari as the mosaicist). But Maratta was now an old man, and Giuseppe Chiari was in 1708 charged with painting further models on the basis of drawings provided by Maratta. The mosaics of the chapel were finally completed in 1725. Maratta’s models for the lunettes now hang in the Benediction Loggia of St Peter’s; his models for the pendentives are lost; and the models for the vault were taken in 1727 to the cathedral of Urbino, where they were destroyed when the dome collapsed in 1789.

Also in the Royal Collection is a nude study for Balaam (RCIN 904124) and there are further studies for the figure in Düsseldorf. Maratta seems to have based the pose on a drawing by Giovanni Lanfranco for a prophet in Santi Apostoli, Naples, and it is probable that he owned that drawing and another fifty-five by Lanfranco and his circle, which were later bound as an album for George III.

Catalogue entry adapted from The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque, London, 2007