Lorenzo Garbieri was one of the most faithful followers of Ludovico Carracci. He combined the dramatic elements of Ludovico’s style with fashionably Caravaggesque lighting, and his dense compositions are almost entirely articulated by heavy figures with inflated musculature. This is a study for Garbieri’s altarpiece in San Paolo Maggiore, Bologna, commissioned by the papal legate Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani.

This drawing is important as a study for one of Garbieri’s certain works, his altarpiece of San Carlo Borromeo interceding for the cessation of the plague in San Paolo Maggiore, Bologna.

Carlo Borromeo (1538-84) had been created a cardinal and Archbishop of Milan on the election of his uncle as Pope Pius IV in 1560, though he did not reside in Milan until 1565. During 1576 the plague struck the city, and disregarding his own well-being, Borromeo devoted himself to pastoral duties, at one point leading a penitential procession carrying a relic of the Holy Nail. It is this act of intercession that Garbieri has depicted. The layout of the final composition has been established, though in the painting Garbieri eliminated the background figures and angels to the left, and enlarged the remaining figures. Instead of praying before the cross, as here, in the painting Borromeo clutches it, and the Holy Nail is visible at the centre of the cross. To the right in the painting is one of the four ancient crosses that marked the boundaries of Bologna (now housed in San Petronio); Garbieri transplanted this to Milan to emphasise the processional nature of the intercession.

Borromeo was canonised on 1 November 1610, and shortly afterwards Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani commissioned Garbieri to execute a cycle of paintings on the life of the saint for a chapel in the Barnabite church of San Paolo, which was then being rebuilt. Giustiniani was the papal legate to Bologna from 1606 to 1611, when he was replaced by Maffeo Barberini, later Urban VIII; Borromeo had himself been papal legate to the city from 1560 to 1562, which might explain Giustiniani’s particular interest in the saint.

Garbieri was especially responsive to the caravaggesque style brought back to Bologna by artists who had recently visited Rome; Carlo Cesare Malvasia reported that he had made a copy of Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas, then in the Lambertini collection in Bologna. Giustiniani and his brother, the Marchese Vincenzo, owned several works by Caravaggio, and it may have been that Benedetto was interested in Garbieri because of his preference for caravaggesque lighting (though his mannered figure style was far from the realism of Caravaggio). According to Malvasia, Garbieri continued to execute paintings for Giustiniani after the Cardinal returned to Rome, though no works by the artist are identifiable in the posthumous inventory of Giustiniani’s collection. A drawing of the same subject in Düsseldorf was connected with Garbieri’s painting by scholars, but the connection seems to have been made solely on the basis of the subject matter. The style of the Düsseldorf drawing bears little resemblance to the present sheet; it has a curved upper left corner and must have been designed for a lunette, and Fischer Pace subsequently attributed it to the painter and engraver Carlo Cesi (1622-82).

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