Saint Anthony of Padua with the Christ Child

A pupil of his father, a painter of majolica, then Domenico Piola, Guidobono was the most restrained, technically refined, and sincere of the leading painters in late-century Genoa. The experience of ascendant French painting at Turin, for which he worked regularly, and of Correggio in Parma, where he visited around 1680, inspired his further pursuit of a soft, luminous atmosphere and a precious sentiment in his paintings. The very few drawings attributed to Guidobono are unmistakably related to Piola’s, but less stable in their forms and more tremulous in their washes. Replete with references to the painterly conception of Cas-tiglione’s later studies, redolent of the religious ecstasy of Correggio’s paintings, this previously unpublished drawing is one of Guidobono’s finest. It can be compared with the Collection’s superb painting, probably of the next decade