Niccolo Ricciolini

Relatively few drawings by Niccolo Ricciolini survive. One of the leading members of the late Roman baroque dynasty of painters, Ricciolini was also an engraver, sculptor and architectural scholar. Patronised by religious orders as well as the prominent families of the period, he received prestigious commissions for St Peter's in Rome as well as other important projects in Lazio, Tuscany, Umbria and the Marches.

The present sheet does not relate to one of the artist's painted commissions, but is highly recognisable in terms of his draughtsmanship and can be compared with drawings executed in the 1760s and 1770s. Francesco Grisolia, whose article on Ricciolini's drawings will be published in Studi sul Settecento romano, has compared the present sheet with two unpublished drawings in the Uffizi, Florence, signed and dated 1763 and 1764, one of which is for the painting in the Sala dei Fasti Colonna in the Palazzo Barberini, Rome.¹ Grisolia also remarks on another comparable sheet in the Martin-von-Wagner-Museum, Wurzburg, depicting Cincinnatus leaving the Plow for the Roman Dictatorship.²

1. Niccolo Ricciolini, Cardinal Giuseppe Colonna, Prisoner of the Turks and A Cardinal following the Construction of a building, Uffizi, Florence

2. S. Moret, Römische Barockzeichnungen im Martin-von-Wagner-Museum der Universität Würzburg, Regensburg 2012, cat. no. 342, reproduced