This pencil drawing points up the key role that Vincenzo Camuccini’s studies of the great masters of the past played in his formative years.  The drawing depicts a detail from a fresco of the Flagellation of St. Andrew painted by Domenichino on the right-hand wall of the chapel of St. Andrew abutting the church of San Gregorio al Celio in Rome in 1608.  In particular, the drawing depicts the right leg of the figure administering the flagellation and is a companion piece to another drawing of almost the same size (which passed through this gallery in 2003) depicting the same figure’s left leg (Antonacci, n. 33).

The fresco in question, which was commissioned from Domenichino by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the commendatory abbot of the Basilica of San Gregorio al Celio at the time, is one of the chief panels in a decorative scheme devised for the chapel in the first decade of the 17th century, on which the cardinal employed a group of young artists from Bologna (and the surrounding area) all associated with the Carracci brothers’ school.  In addition to Domenichino the group included Guido Reni, Giovanni Lanfranco, Sisto Badalocchio and Cavedone, and the fruit of their labours in the chapel was to have a crucial impact on the development of classicism in Rome in the 17th century (Cantone).

It was to sources such as these that young Camuccini turned, his keen interest allowing him to develop a style based on a profound assimilation of the canons of classicism, on a determination to pursue ideal beauty and on a conscious decision to adopt an academic register both in his choice of subject matter and in the composition of his works.  The result was a style obedient to the fundamental tenets of classicism in its focus on the human figure as the leading player on the stage.  Camuccini explored the structure of the human body in great depth, studying it both through its depiction in the statuary and painting of the past and through observation of its workings and mechanisms in the flesh, as we can see for example in the anatomical drawings of bodies in the hospital of Santo Spirito, which he produced at the age of only sixteen and which were subsequently gathered into two albums owned by his heirs until only a few years ago (Salvi) and recently exhibited in the Galleria Antonacci Lapiccirella (Antonacci-Lapiccirella).  The drawing under discussion here is thus a product of the young artist’s formative years, when he devoted his energies to studying the drawings and paintings of the great 16th century masters, in particular those of Raphael and Michelangelo.

Most of these studies, which Camuccini himself was to collect together in albums (complete with price tags in the event of a sale), were what he himself called “cartoons” precisely because the use of a simple medium such as a pencil allowed him to indulge in a more meticulous exploration and accurate rendering of every single detail in his search for the perfect drawing, which was to form the very foundation of his personal style.  His autograph list of “Cartoni presso i Grandi Maestri” [“Cartoons After the Great Masters”] (Piantoni, p. 100) includes “il Frustatore di Domenichino esistente a S. Gregorio” [“Domenichino’s Whipper in San Gregorio”], although some doubt remains as to whether his words refer to a drawing of the entire figure or to this detail of the figure’s right leg and to the detail of the left leg mentioned above.

In view of all the above, it is hardly surprising that the shapely, well-muscled right leg of Domenichino’s “flagellator” should have become the sole focus of a study designed to convey the tension of the physical gesture and the swelling of the veins beneath the skin, in a formative exercise which the matchless quality of the draughtsmanship has transformed today into a work of beauty in its own right.