Annibale Carracci

Francesco Angeloni, Rome;
Pierre Mignard, Paris;
Pierre Crozat, Paris, his numbering lower right: 31;
Pierre-Jean Mariette, Paris (L.1852), on his mount, with the cartouche inscribed, see above);
his sale, Paris, Basan, 15 November 1775-30 January 1776, part of lot 298 or 299;
Pierre Hédouin, Paris (bears his mark on the mount, PH in ligature, not in Lugt);
his sale, 27 December 1866;
Mme Rieunier, Paris;
sale, Paris, Drouot, 12 December 1990, lot 29;
Jean-Pierre Selz, Paris; acquired in 1991

Alvin Lorenzo Clark, Jr., in Disegno, Giudizio e bella Maniera, Studi sul disegno italiano in onore di Catherine Goguel, Milan 2005, no. 82, reproduced p. 143

Laid down on the old Mariette mount which has been partly reduced but still includes good margins and the cartouche. The mount is in quite good condition. Mariette has also beautifully increased the drawing at the top and bottom and at the lower right corner, where the drawing had been irregularly cut. The iron ink has eaten throught the paper in the middle of the female figure to the left margin, where there are also two light brown stains. Some scribbles on the verso seem to come through on the recto, near the top right margin and also at the left, below the middle of the sheet. A little scattered foxing, although the image remains strong and powerful. The drawing is sold mounted and framed in a modern gilded frame.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Writing in 1678, Malvasia recorded the fame of the collection of Francesco Angeloni, which had been dispersed after his death in 1652. A scholar, numismatist and lover of antiquities and paintings, Angeloni owned two folio volumes of drawings by Annibale for the Farnese gallery, as well as a collection of landscape drawings by Agostino, Annibale and Domenichino. How Angeloni acquired these drawings by the Carracci is not known, but it may well have been directly from Annibale, shortly before his death, as the drawings in question did not appear in the inventory of the artist's possessions drawn up two days after he died. Giovanni Pietro Bellori, who served as secretary to Angeloni, had been supposed to inherit the contents of his studio, but after a successful lawsuit Angeloni's family were permitted to put the collection up for sale. At this sale, the French artist Pierre Mignard bought a substantial portion of the drawings by the Carracci, and particularly those by Annibale, acquiring more than 300 studies by the master.

This is the exceptional early provenance of the present drawing, which then continued its illustrious journey through two of the greatest and most exclusive collections of eighteenth-century France, those of the famous banker Pierre Crozat, and of the man who can plausibly be considered the greatest drawings connoisseur of all, Pierre-Jean Mariette. Mariette laid all his drawings down on his characteristic blue mounts, with their wash borders, gold bands and distinctive cartouches.  These inscriptions often, as here, give important information not only about the attribution, but also about the provenance of the drawings.  As we also see here, Mariette sometimes sensitively enlarged and extended incomplete sheets, demonstrating in this potentially controversial process an exquisite taste and understanding that meant the aesthetic qualities of the drawings in question were always improved, rather than compromised.  

This powerful and accomplished pen study by Annibale could relate to the artist's famous canvas depicting The Choice of Hercules, painted for the center vault of the Camerino, in the Palazzo Farnese, Rome (fig. 1).  Some time before the summer of 1595, Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, who had already been instrumental in obtaining commissions for the Carraci, devised for them another project, the decoration of a room, or camerino, most probably the Cardinal's study, on the north flank of the spectacular Palazzo -- a sumptuous building designed by Antonio da San Gallo and Michelangelo. Annibale's painting of The Choice of Hercules adorned the center vault of the camerino until its removal in 1662, and is now in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. The subject encapsulated the moral lesson of the entire ceiling, which revolves around the theme of Virtue. The story, taken from the Greek sophist Prodicus of Keos, describes the visit of two women to the young Hercules, who is shown in the present sheet resting isolated on a rock. The two women confronted Hercules with a choice between two ways of life, one voluptuous and attractive, the other stern and sober.  The adolescent Hercules in the end chose virtue.  The iconographic programme of the camerino was prepared by Fulvio Orsini (1529-1600), the Farnese librarian and antiquarian, who evidently included this subject as a moral lesson for the young cardinal Odoardo, who was just twenty-two at the time.

From the evidence of other surviving studies, including drawings at the Louvre and in Dijon, Annibale clearly worked hard to arrive at his final compositions for this project.¹   One of the studies at the Louvre, a sheet executed in pen and ink representing The Dying Hercules and other Studies, is particularly close in handling to the present work.²  The nude at the bottom right of the Louvre drawing has been related to the dying Hercules on the funeral pyre, painted in grisaille on the lintel of one of the camerino's windows, and also datable to around 1596. There the use of the pen is very close to the Horvitz sheet, with very similar quick parallel strokes and clear definition of light and shade.  Annibale must have made many such rapid pen studies in the initial stages of defining his compositions, followed by detailed chalk studies of individual figures, many of which were in the Angeloni collection, and are now preserved mostly in the Louvre, or the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon.

When Alvin Clark published this very beautiful but previously undocumented drawing (see Literature) he noted that although the subject could be a Choice of Hercules, the style of the drawing appeared to be later than the decoration of the Camerino, and that it might therefore represent a subsequent return by Annibale to the same subject. Clark also noted that the style of the drawing -- with its strong parallel hatching across parts of the nude male and the woman to the right -- is found in a number of late drawings such as Apollo receiving the lyre from Mercury (Royal Collection, Windsor Castle), which is a design for the wall decorations in the Farnese Gallery that Annibale painted in 1603-4.³ Furthermore, he stressed the stylistic similarities with another drawing at Windsor of a similar date: 'The searching and seemingly idiosyncratic flurry of fluid curving lines that make up the lower part of the body of the woman on the left resembles a group of drawings of the same period such as the Saint Catherine of circa 1605'...⁴

1. John Rupert Martin, The Farnese Gallery, Princeton, New Jersey 1965, fig.112

2. The Drawings of Annibale Carracci, exhibition catalogue, Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, 1999, cat. no. 32, reproduced p. 133

3.  R. Wittkower, The Drawings of the Carracci, in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, at Windsor Castle, London 1952, p. 140, no. 312 , reproduced fig. 36

4. See Wittkower, op. cit., no. 434, reproduced Clark, loc. cit., fig. b