This book explores the rich corpus of drawings by Donato Creti (1671-1749) in the Certani Collection, now housed in the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. Born in Cremona and then brought up in Bologna after the age of three, Donato Creti enjoyed
a very long and industrious career as a painter, fresco artist and above all, draughtsman.
Indeed he was praised for his extraordinary skill in drawing so much that his graphic works began to be collected throughout Europe and are now in major collections on both sides of the Atlantic. The Cini Foundation drawings examined in this book consist of over eighty works including fi fty-seven certainly autograph. The forty illustrations include many new and previously unpublished elements, such as several “versos” of well-known drawings, published here for the fi rst time.