Neither do some more serene drawings. With his thick curly hair on the side of the head, his wrinkled forehead and his expression of aloof understanding, the head is a powerful psychological study. Not much of it is left in the head of Saint Luke in the fresco for which it served as a model in the church of San Andrea della Valle. An exquisite first thought for a ''Virgin and Child'' seen through an oval frame held up by two angels was brisk, jotted down by Carlo Maratta in the 1670s. The quick, nervous strokes give it a vibrant touch.
Descriptive detail is conspicuously absent, movement is all-important.
Even when it gets precise, Maratta's drawing style bears little relationship to his painting. Around the same time, the artist portrayed his friend, the sculptor Domenico Guidi. The intensity of the luminous eyes, the forced smile suggesting intense, barely controllable pain, the flowing rhythm of the unruly hair that comes down over the neck, give the sketch an immediacy unmatched in Maratta's oil portraits, admirable as some of them are. Other likenesses of the period have a timeless quality. In the late 1670s, the rare Giovanni Bonati drew a man standing, holding a book open with one finger, and tilting his head to one side, his lips tightly pressed in tense concentration.