AGOSTINO CARRACCI | Recto: Study of a goat in profile Verso: Study of goat's heads

Vente anonyme, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, Piasa, 18 décembre 2009, n°4 (recto repr.)

Rennes, 2012, n°12 (notice par Catherine Loisel)

Window mounted. The recto show light traces to the right margin of glue, visible also on the verso. There is light brown staining scattered (recto and verso). Overall the media is strong. Sold unframed.
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As Catherine Loisel noted in her Rennes exhibition catalogue entry, this double sided sheet was rightly associated by Nicholas Schwed and Christian Adrien with two other double sided drawings bearing similar old attributions to Agostino Carracci, in the British Museum¹ and in a French private collection (for images see Exposition).  The British Museum drawing, donated to the Museum by Count Antoine Seilern (1901-1978), was formerly in the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps, and was published as Agostino Carracci by A.E. Popham in 1935.² 

The old pen and ink attribution on the verso of the London sheet is unquestionably in the same handwriting that is seen on the recto of the present drawing.  The two sheets are almost identical in size and executed in the same media, and may well originate from the same album of sketches.  Catherine Loisel has proposed, on stylistic grounds, that the Adrien sheet could in fact be a late, autograph work by Agostino, dating from the time when the artist was working on the fresco decorations depicting the story of Peleus and Thetis in a vaulted room of the Palazzo del Giardino in Parma, a project he left unfinished due to his sudden death in 1602.  Loisel also stresses similarities in handling with a double sided sheet of studies in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which relates to the same decoration, and is drawn in the same very controlled and economical pen and ink technique.³  She suggests that these sketches, some of which are unfinished, may have been conceived as part of a composition on a theme such as the infant Jupiter fed by the goat Amalthae.

For another drawing by Agostino Carracci in the Adrien Collection, see lot 24.

^1. London, British Museum, inv. no. 1946,0713.714 (as Circle of Agostino Carracci)

^2. A.E. Popham, Catalogue of Drawings in the Collection formed by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bart., F.R.S., now in the possession of House, Cheltenham, London 1935, p. 47, no. 7 (as Agostino Carracci) 

^3. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 1972.133.1; for images (recto and verso) see J. Bean, 17^th Century Italian Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1979, no. 93, reproduced figs. 93 and 93v