Over 500 drawings by Pietro Berrettini da Cortona (1597-1669) are scattered in almost 100 collections all over the Western World, from Adelaide to Würzburg, with major holdings in Berlin, Düsseldorf, London, New York, Paris, Vienna, Windsor Castle and, above all, in Florence and Rome. The present catalogue brings them all together and presents the sum of the author’s studies on the artist conducted over the past four decades.

Cortona’s extant œuvre consists of a great variety of sketches, studies and compositional drawings spanning his entire career and mirroring his outstanding role in Roman baroque art and architecture. In the introductory essay, illustrated with some 160 colour plates of exemplary specimens, an outline of the state of research is followed by seventeen chapters on the artist’s stylistic development and various categories of drawings such as drawings after the Antique and Polidoro da Caravaggio, anatomical drawings, landscape and life drawings, architectural drawings and drawings for prints. Special chapters are dedicated to the principal fresco in the Palazzo Barberini, Cortona’s work in Florence, and a survey of drawings of his most important collaborators Pietro Paolo Baldini, Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, Guglielmo Cortese, Ciro Ferri and Lazzaro Baldi. This section is concluded with a detailed analysis of the dispersal of, and confusions about Cortona’s drawings that still remain a problem today.

In the catalogue section the drawings are arranged in approximately chronological order and discussed in detail together with the connected frescoes, paintings, engravings and architectural projects. The up-to-date entries are fully illustrated, amounting altogether to some 700 figures in black and white. A comprehensive bibliography and various indices conclude the volume.