A letter from Johann Adam, Prince of Liechtenstein to the artist Marcantonio Franceschini shows how at the age of twenty-two Creti's fame as a draughtsman had already spread to powerful foreign patrons: "sentiamo ancora che si trova là un tal chiamato Ragazzino e deve essere un grandissimo disegnatore... [We hear that there is a certain man there named Ragazzino and that he is a very great draughtsman]."(1)

Creti, born in Cremona in 1671, received his nickname of Ragazzino [little boy] when he was training in the Bolognese studio of Lorenzo Pasinelli because he was the youngest and most talented student. Pasinelli's teaching was supplemented by the study of prints by his master Cantarini and Guido Reni himself, which may have facilitated Creti's development of a linear, subtly-hatched style. While still in Pasinelli's studio, Creti was discovered by the patron Alessandro Fava, whose son Pietro was also Pasinelli's student. By 1708 Creti was working for other patrons, including the Pepoli family, for whom he created frescoes including Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot. In 1713 the Sbaraglia family began their decisive support, commissioning canvases with stories of Achilles and perhaps influencing his founding membership in the Accademia Clementina. Creti was the academy's director seven times between 1713 and 1727, becoming principe in 1728. He turned to religious painting in a serious manner only in the 1730s and 40s, producing a series of altarpieces for major Bolognese churches before his death in 1749.

The Crocker Virgin and Child entered the collection as the work of Francesco Amato, the early seventeenth-century Neapolitan printmaker, before being identified as Creti's by Wilhelm Suida.(2) It is an especially attractive example of the artist's unique draughtsmanship, with the long curved lines that record drapery and flesh forming a counterpoint to the shorter, carefully angled crossed and parallel lines that create volume. The composition is related to the Saint Ignatius adoring the Virgin and Child in Glory of 1737,(3) painted for the cathedral church of San Pietro in Bologna and itself indebted to Guido Reni's Madonna with Three Saints of 1620-21 now in Dresden(4) for the central group, as Walter Vitzthum pointed out in 1970.(5) Vitzthum also pointed out a drawing in the British Museum which shares elements with the Crocker sheet.(6) The former is more closely related to the altarpiece's central group, sharing the setting on clouds, the Virgin's drapery and pose, the Child's body and the crown-bearing putti above, though the gestures of Child and putti differ. This sheet is also quicker and more gestural than the more highly-worked Crocker drawing, and both its mise-en-page and the autograph inscription "Di me Donato Creti" suggest that, as Renato Roli pointed out, it is a record of the finished group perhaps meant as a gift.(7)

The present writer sees the Crocker drawing as the artist's further development of the British Museum drawing rather than the painting, especially since such details as the position of the feet correspond so closely. Creti enthrones the Virgin on a raised platform, thereby creating new rhythms in the composition, with a diagonal traversing the throne's finial and the heads of Virgin and Child and a harpy-like creature, perhaps meant to be part of the throne, echoing the latter's pose at right. Other changes animate the new composition: the Virgin is turned further away from the viewer and grasps her bodice with closed hand as she gazes at the Cross now held by the Infant; the light source now streams from upper left; and the Virgin's shoulder is now revealed above the folds of her heavy cloak. By creating this self-contained pyramidal composition, Creti has gone far beyond the drawing and altarpiece that precede it. Though Creti's works were occasionally engraved, it seems that the new subject is more appropriate for a small devotional painting, perhaps one never executed.(8) The most logical date for the Crocker drawing is after the British Museum sheet from which it derives, both postdating the altarpiece of 1737.

William Breazeale, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010