Fabrizio Boschi

Fabrizio Boschi, a talented painter and draftsman, was a contemporary of Cigoli, Santi di Tito, and Jacopo da Empoli and like them an exponent of the early Baroque in Florence. This impressive, monumental and highly finished study would appear to be a modello for a painting, although no such work by Boschi is known or mentioned in early sources such as Baldinucci's Notizie de' Professori del Disegno. The study nonetheless evinces the distinctive mannerisms of Boschi's graphic style, notably the figures' sausage-like fingers and long sloping noses, while the unusual spiked crown sported by the two protagonists recurs in a number of his drawn compositions.
Misidentified at the time the drawing appeared at auction in July 2011 as a scene from the life of Saint Lucy, the unusual subject of this splendid sheet is Saint Cecilia before the Roman prefect Almachius -- a scene portrayed in a contemporary fresco by Domenichino in S. Luigi dei Francesi in Rome but otherwise rarely depicted. Indeed, the subject is a specifically Roman one, reflecting the heightened interest in the life of the early Christian martyr after the discovery of her miraculously inviolable remains in the crypt of the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, during works there in 1599 (In addition to Domenichino's frescoes, paintings of Saint Cecilia by Guido Reni and Freancesco Vanni as well as the celebrated marble sculpture by Stefano Maderno date to the same moment.) The expressly Roman nature of the subject matter suggests that Boschi's drawing may have been executed during his period of residency in the city (1602-6), which coincided with the newly intense preoccupation with this hagiographic subject. It is perhaps an idea for an unexecuted painting or a commission the artist hoped but failed to receive.