In the past two decades the name of the Spanish diplomat Juan de Lezcano has become familiar to students of Orazio Borgianni. It was to Lezcano that Borgianni dedicated, probably in 1615, his etching of St Christopher (Fig.3) made after the painting he had executed for Lezcano.' In the artist's will of 30th November 1615, he appointed Lezcano - described as 'l'illustre signor Giovanni de Lescano secretario dell'Illustrissimo et eccellentissimo signor Don Francesco Conte de Castro Imbasciatore del Catolico Re di Spagna appresso Nostro Signore' - as one of his executors and also bequeathed him a small painting of the Crucifixion and a sword.

In November 1661 Cardinal Rinaldo d'Este received a letter from his Roman agent discussing the suitability of various Roman artists for a major fresco cycle. This document, first published in 1892, has always been taken to refer to a project for the palace rented by the Este family in Rome,' but the recent recovery of the rest of the correspondence now makes clear that it concerns a series of frescoes planned by the artist Pietro da Cortona for a suite of six rooms in the new Palazzo Ducale in Modena (Fig. 18). In a sequence of letters written between September 1661 and February 1662 (see the Appendix below), Rinaldo's Roman agent, Girolamo Muzzarelli, chronicles the development of this project which, had it not been abandoned, would have been Pietro da Cortona's last, and perhaps his grandest, cycle of dynastic frescoes, surpassing those in the Palazzo Pitti in size, and unusually including explicit references to modern history. Besides illuminating the complicated process of devising a large-scale fresco-cycle at long distance, the letters underline the different attitudes towards the conception of such cycles in the ducal capitals of central Italy as opposed to papal Rome.2 They provide a rare glimpse into the workings of Cortona's studio and the process of iconographic invention,3 and also reveal the artist's mature beliefs about painting.