Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus Bruges 1523 - 1605 Florence

This is a finished study related to a series of illustrations for an edition of The Odyssey that Stradanus most probably prepared in collaboration with the scholar and writer Luigi Alamanni, for whom he was also making drawings for Dante's Inferno in 1587-88.  Several drawings for the project have survived, including six other finished studies like the present one: three in the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, one in the Courtauld Institute, London, and two formerly on the art market.  A further nine preparatory sketches for the same project are known, divided between the Cooper Hewitt Museum and the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (see Alessandra Baroni Vannucci, Jan Van der Straet detto Giovanni Stradano, Milan 1997, pp. 216-219, nos. 176 -192).  A preparatory sketch related to The Blinding of Polyphemus is in the Cooper Hewitt Museum (inv.1901-39-146).  That drawing appears to be the only sheet to include two horizontal compositions: at the top the blinding of Polyphemus and below a scene of martyrdom (Baroni Vannucci, op. cit.,  p. 218, no. 189, reproduced).  The drawing for the frontispiece of this project is in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, San Francisco (Baroni Vannucci, op.cit., p. 216, no. 177, reproduced), but no edition of the book seems to have been produced by the time of Alamanni's death in 1603.  The finished studies in this series are characterized by the same extensive use of blue wash as in other Stradanus drawings.