For a long time two major personalities of the Italian Seicento, Marcantonio Bassetti and Fra Semplice da Verona, have been mainly known as painters. Their excellence as draughtsmen have become strikingly evident in the last fifty years or so, and with regard to the Capuchin painter Semplice even more recently.

The collections of the Cabinet of Prints and Drawings in Berlin have contributed to increasing Semplice’s corpus. Berlin heralds a guiding role of the worldwide largely dispersed sheets, which has now been enhanced by new discoveries, as usual hidden among unreliable attributions or anonymous drawings.

Bassetti had suffered a similar destiny, the newly discovered sheets – many of them copies after famous Renaissance Venetian examples – were for the most part placed among the Anonymous German ones.

Furthermore, the present author suggests – under his responsibility alone and specifically as regards Fra Semplice – that a group of pen sketches might shed light on a stylistic practice of the artist from Verona, parallel to his well-known and appreciated finished studies in different kinds of chalk. As for this glorious species, a new preparatory drawing for an existing painting has been regained.