Giovanni Lanfranco
(bapt Parma, 26 Jan 1582; d Rome, 29 Nov 1647).
Italian painter and draughtsman. A major figure in the development of
the Roman Baroque in the 1620s, he painted many altarpieces and some
cabinet pictures, but was notable above all for a number of dome
frescoes that are indebted to the works of Correggio; most celebrated is
the Assumption of the Virgin (1625–7) in the dome of S Andrea
della Valle, Rome. He also influenced the development of art in Naples,
where, between 1634 and 1646, he executed a series of vast fresco
commissions that look forward to the art of Luca Giordano and Francesco
Solimena. A vast number of Lanfranco’s preparatory drawings survive, the
majority of which are now in the Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di
Capodimonte, Naples. Broadly speaking they are of two types: small
compositional sketches, either in brown pen, with or without brown wash,
on white or beige fine paper, or in red chalk, sometimes with red wash,
or, more rarely, in black chalk or a combination of both red and black;
and slightly larger figure studies, drawn after the live model, in black
and white chalk on rough, coloured (beige, green, grey or bluish) paper.
