Known as ‘il Grechetto’, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione trained in the Genoese studio of Giovanni Battista Paggi and, following Paggi’s death in 1627, with Giovanni Andrea de’ Ferrari. He may also have trained with Anthony Van Dyck (who was in Genoa between 1621 and 1627) and Sinibaldo Scorza, whose work seems to have had the most influence on the young artist. Like Scorza, Castiglione developed a particular speciality of animal paintings, pastoral scenes and Old Testament subjects, and in the later part of his career began to produce paintings and drawings which were intensely religious in feeling. Apart from working extensively in his native Genoa, he travelled widely and was active in Venice, Parma, Naples and Rome. From 1651, however, he worked mostly in Mantua, where he was employed by the Gonzaga court, and where he died in 1664.

Castiglione is perhaps best known today as for his graphic work. He was a prolific and spirited draughtsman, and made numerous drawings not just as studies for painted compositions but also as works in their own right. He worked mainly in pen and wash, but also developed an innovative technique of drawing with thinned oil paint applied directly onto the sheet with the brush. He was also a gifted and inventive printmaker, and is sometimes credited with the invention of the monotype process. The largest surviving group of drawings and oil sketches by the artist is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, while another significant group is in the Albertina in Vienna.

Castiglione’s pen drawings have, on the whole, been less studied than his brush drawings in oil on paper, which are perhaps of more obvious attraction. As one scholar has pointed out, ‘It is the extreme cursiveness of the pen drawings that deprives them of immediate appeal, which is the principal attraction of the more finished brush drawings...though the pen drawings manifest a decisiveness that proves them to be by a draftsman of the first order, they give every indication of having been executed with extreme rapidity.' (1)

The present sheet may be compared with a handful of similarly handled pen and wash drawings by Castiglione, notably a study of God Appearing to a Patriarch in a private collection in Princeton, N.J. (Ann Percy, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione: Master Draughtsman of the Italian Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia, 1971, p.96, no.62, p.100, fig.62) Percy has dated the latter drawing to c.1650-1655 and compares the sheet, in its fluid washes and penwork, to two further drawings by Castiglione; a pastoral landscape in Berlin (Inv.4440) and a study of shepherds (lost).

Notes

1. Richard Paul Wunder, ‘Castiglione Pen Drawings in the Cooper Union Museum’, The Art Bulletin, September 1960, p.219.

B&W photo given to Timothy Standring, September 2005, for study. He was noncommittal re: Francesco or Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione.

Ack: Standring for provenance.