Lot Essay
The attribution to Maratta was kindly confirmed by Stella Rudolph on the basis of a photograph in a letter dated 21 November 1996 and by Ann Sutherland Harris in a letter dated 6 December 1996. The present drawing is possibly a design for a silver plate and it compares with four modelli by Maratta for large silver plates, now at Chatsworth, M. Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Drawings, Roman and Neapolitan Schools, London, 1994, nos. 252-5, illustrated. The Chatsworth drawings are designs for Piatti di San Giovanni that were to be offered on the feast day of Saint John by the Pallavicini family to the Grand Duke Cosimo III of Tuscany, in accordance with the will of the Genoese Cardinal Lazzaro Pallavicini. The dishes were to be executed in solid silver worth about three hundred scudi. The first dish was offered in 1680. Stella Rudolph dates the drawing to the 1670s by comparing it with drawings related to frescoes in the Altieri Palace datable to these years.