The Morgan Library & Museum's collection of Italian old master drawings is one of the most significant in this country and functions as a cornerstone of the institution's holdings in graphic art. The nucleus of the Morgan's Italian drawings—presently numbering at nearly three thousand sheets including sketchbook and album pages—originated in Pierpont Morgan's 1909 purchase of fifteen hundred drawings from the Fairfax Murray collection, which contained exceptional examples of sixteenth- and eighteenth-century Italian draftsmanship. Since then the Morgan has acquired, through both purchases and gifts, remarkable Italian drawings and continues to grow.

The Morgan houses drawings by Italy's most prominent Renaissance artists. Florence—arguably the center of draftsmanship in Renaissance Italy—yielded a plethora of master draftsmen, such as Sandro Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, and Fra Bartolommeo, whose works reveal the central role of drawing in the artistic process. This practice is brought to a remarkable level of perfection in drawings by the canonical triumvirate of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. The succeeding generation of artists, such as Andrea del Sarto, Jacopo Pontormo, and Luca Signorelli, as well as major north Italian masters of the Renaissance, such as Correggio, Parmigianino, and Andrea Mantegna, are also well-represented in the collection.

From artists who worked for papal Rome during the seventeenth century, the Morgan owns significant works by Annibale Carracci, Gianlorenzo Bernini, and Pietro da Cortona. The breadth of the Morgan's collection of Italian Baroque drawings is due in large part to the incorporation during the second half of the twentieth century of the Janos Scholz collection, which introduced a large number of accomplished drawings by artists working in various artistic centers, such as Bologna, Naples, Genoa, and Milan.

Venetian drawings are a particularly rich component of the Morgan's Italian drawings collection. In addition to drawings by Renaissance masters such as Vittore Carpaccio, Titian, Jacopo Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese, the Morgan's holdings comprise the best collection of Venetian eighteenth-century drawings in the United States. Sheets with elegant views of Venice by Canaletto and Giambattista Tiepolo's exquisite decorative designs are numerous and of the highest quality.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680)

Portrait of Sisinio Poli, 1638
Black, red, and white chalk, on light brown paper
Inscribed on paper attached to lower edge of drawing, in pen and brown ink, Eques Laurentinus Berninus / Die vigesima octavo Aprilis 1638 / Delineavit / Effigies Sisinii Poli anno aetatis Suae / Decimo octavo.
Gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924; IV, 174

Numerous finished chalk portraits by Bernini intended as independent works of art are known. This sensitively rendered likeness bears an uncommon inscription identifying the sitter as Sisinio Poli, depicted on 28 April 1638 at the age of eighteen. At this time Poli was Writer of Apostolic Letters under Pope Urban VIII and active as an amateur artist in the circle of Francesco Barberini. Bernini was later to construct and decorate for Sisinio the Poli family chapel in San Crisogono, Rome.