Saint John the Baptist Baptizing the Multitude

The drawing is a study for the lower half of a fresco on the left wall of the Poggi Chapel, representing ‘Saint John The Baptist Baptizing the Multitudes’ (San Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna), and probably dating between 1554 and 1556. The energetic tangle of lines of this drawing recalls the style of Taddeo Zuccaro, who, like Tibaldi, was active in Rome in the 1540s and 1550s. Like Tibaldi's imaginative frescoes for the Palazzo Poggi (for which see also the preparatory study for the figure of Aeolus in the Museum’s collection: acc. no. 2007.127), the frescoes in the Poggi chapel had considerable influence on such Bolognese artists as Samacchini and Passarotti. Moreover, when Lodovico, Agostino, and Annibale Carracci founded their famous academy in Bologna - in which they sought to reform painting through a renewed study of nature combined with a study of the best artworks - the Poggi Chapel was among the models they recommended to their students.


A companion sheet for the upper portion of this same fresco, with figures of exactly the same scale but drawn in a more complex tonal technique and with extensive black chalk underdrawing, is in the Collection of David and Julie Tobey, New York (promised gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; see Carmen C. Bambach in ‘An Italian Journey: Drawings from the Tobey Collection, Correggio to Tiepolo,’ 2010, no. 24). As the techniques of execution seem slightly different, it is probable that the two drawings are not fragments from the same sheet of paper. Tibaldi's fresco on the opposite wall represents the ‘Conception of St. John The Baptist,’ for which a composition study exists at the Royal Library, Windsor Castle ( RL 5965, see: Popham and Wilde 1949, no. 947, pl. 109 and Zamboni 1967, fig. 46).

(Carmen C. Bambach, 2006, revised 2010)