Mary as Queen of Heaven or Apotheosis of Saint n.d.

Antonio Balestra made this drawing, Mary as Queen of Heaven or Apotheosis of a Saint, with pen and brown ink wash on paper. It is an example of the kind of preparatory study an artist from the Italian Baroque era might produce before embarking on a large-scale history painting. As the title suggests, this sketch depicts the Virgin Mary, elevated to divine status, surrounded by cherubic angels. The visual vocabulary of the Italian Baroque, of which Balestra was a master, was inextricably linked to the project of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. After the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic church needed to reassert its authority, and lavish spectacles of art and architecture played a key role in this. Balestra would have been employed by wealthy patrons, and likely also by the church, to create images that emphasized the importance of the Catholic faith. In order to understand the drawing more fully, we might research the patronage networks in Venice and Verona in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, as well as the artistic institutions that fostered the development of artists like Balestra.