This energetic drawing seems to represent a plan for a processional float. Surrounded by clouds and flanked by an eagle, St. John the Evangelist ascends from an ornate basin to confront his vision of the Apocalyptic Virgin: clothed by the sun, standing on the moon, and crushing a multiheaded dragon. While in Rome, Herrera would have encountered Gianlorenzo Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa, the Baroque dynamism of which may have inspired this design for an ephemeral sculpture. At the bottom of the sheet there are five small schematic plans of the sculpture's pedestal, with the artist's signature in the lower left cartouche. --Exhibition Label, from "Visions and Nightmares: Four Centuries of Spanish Drawings"
Inscribed in pen and brown ink in the plan at lower left, "D[on] fran.co de herrera"; in faint black chalk at upper left above figure, "herrera".
Baker, Walter C., donor.
Calmann, Hans M., 1899-1982, former owner.
Pierpont Morgan Library. Review of Acquisitions, 1949-1968. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1969, p. 149.
Adams, Frederick B., Jr., comp. Eleventh Report to the Fellows of the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1961. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1961, p. 89-91.
100 Master drawings from the Morgan Library & Museum. München : Hirmer, 2008, no. 37, repr. [Kurt Zetiler]