This drawing was possibly made in preparation for a fresco cycle that Lazzaro Baldi executed for a chapel in the Basilica di Sant'Anastasia in Verona, featuring scenes from the life of Saint Charles Borromeo and Filippo Neri. Pope Paul V canonized Borromeo shortly before Baldi's birth in 1610, and Borromeo was venerated as a saint of learning and the arts by many painters and by the building of many churches and chapels dedicated to him in the seventeenth century in northern Italy and Rome.
Nicholas Turner has rightly described Lazzaro Baldi's figures as characteristically broad-nosed, big-eyed, and narrow-browed in a manner similar to Pietro da Cortona's late work (Nicholas Turner, "Some Drawings by Lazzaro Baldi," The Burlington Magazine vol. 121, no. 912 (March 1979), p. 150). The coarse features of Saint Charles Borromeo and the surrounding figures are stylistically comparable to a study for a print in the British Museum, featuring St. Luke the Evangelist (inv. 1941, 1011.171).
McCrindle, Joseph F., former owner.