Working for most of his career in provincial isolation in the Marchigian town of Montefortino, Fortunato Duranti remains something of an anomaly among 19th century Italian draughtsmen. Little is known of this eccentric artist, who developed a highly idiosyncratic style of drawing, with unusual and imaginative subject matter and figures often reduced to basic geometric shapes. He spent some time in Rome early in his career, making the acquaintance of the painters Tommaso Minardi and Felice Giani, both of whom were to be an influence on the young Duranti. Almost his entire output consists of drawings, executed with a distinctive flair and boldness. (It remains as a draughtsman that Duranti is best known today; only a handful of paintings by him survive.) He is thought to have been mentally unstable, perhaps even mad, though as one scholar has commented, ‘If Duranti was mad, madness did not diminish his power of invention and expression. On the contrary: the astonishing fluency of his work gives the impression that his sickness, whatever its nature, was a spur to his talent.’1 He was also active as an antiquarian, art dealer and collector, and left most of his collection to the museum in his native Montefortino. The most significant group of drawings by the artist is today to be found in the Biblioteca Comunale in Fermo, which houses some 1,800 sheets. Other important collections of drawings by Duranti are in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence and the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome.

Although Duranti’s drawings are often accompanied by cryptic inscriptions, only a handful are dated - mostly in the 1830’s and 1840’s - and as such a chronology of his draughtsmanship is difficult to establish. No dated drawing after 1848 is known, however, and it is possible that he may have gradually diminished his output in the decade or so before his death. The drawings seem to have been produced not as studies for paintings but as private exercises; the product of his fertile imagination. (As Lorenz Eitner has noted, ‘There is no reason to suppose...that he intended to sell or publish them. They appear to be, rather, the residue of private fantasy, the record of an obsessed and self-absorbed mind: an endless monologue carried on in a void.’).

Eitner: ‘What sets him apart from more conventional contemporaries is the uninhibited boldness of his imagination and the confidence of his draughtsmanship...His fantasy poured forth images in endless plenty, and he was able to shape them all into compositions, with an apparent ease and assurance which better-ordered minds might have envied him...All of his drawings have the coherence of pictorial ideas clearly visualized and firmly carried out. They contain very few corrections, fumblings, or lapses into vagueness. But while each individual drawing holds together, the totality of Duranti’s work is discontinuous. Every composition stands by itself: it neither builds on some previous one, nor leads to another. Every separate sheet seems complete, self-contained, and detached from the rest. Apart from the constant recurrence of certain subjects, such as the Flight into Egypt, the work lacks overall continuity, and it is in this, not in any particular weakness of form, that we sense the disturbance of Duranti’s mind.’

The iconography of this scene is unusual. The Christ Child, with his delicate halo, is held by an unveiled and youthful Madonna. Two angels are visible to the right, their wings lightly sketched in and a putto holding a banner hovers above. Two further figures are seated at the left, one in classical dress, the other with an elaborate turban or hat. Drawn entirely in black chalk, Duranti alternates thin, sharp detail with soft shading made with the side of the chalk, while thicker, flowing lines delineate the architecture. The rounded forms of the figures form highly decorative patterns whilst the elaboration of line and shading gives a sense of movement and dynamism.