Agostino Carracci

Laid down on a 19th century mount . Overall quite in good condition. A very light grey stain at the top in the middle of the drawing not very visible and some other small grey stains towards the left corner. Surface dirt and a small loss to the left below the draped cloth of the seated Christ.
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Like Annibale, Agostino Carracci produced a large number of finished landscape drawings. These were done generally as works of art in their own right, and surely from the very beginning of the careers of both artists; they are generally considered to date from the last two decades of the sixteenth century.  The present sheet is very delicately drawn, with fine cross hatchings and looser pen strokes which give a good depiction of the variations of the rocky and mountainous landscape.  Christ tempted by the Devil sits on the rocks close to the right foreground, while on the other side the trunk of an old tree is described with energetic use of the pen quite characteristic of Agostino's style.  There are pentimenti in Christ's right foot and left hand.  In the centre of the composition an open space leads to a mountainous background with its delicately drawn details. 

Agostino’s landscapes, although demonstrating the fertility of his invention in making so many variations on a theme, show also a debt to sixteenth-century Venetian landscape drawings and prints, and to Northern ones, often known from engravings.  An attribution to Campagnola is indeed written on the old mount.  The present sheet is not dissimilar to the study by Agostino, formerly attributed to Domenico Campagnola, with on the recto a Landscape with the Sacrifice of Isaac, now in the Courtauld Galleries, London.¹

1. C. Robertson and C. Whistler, Drawings by the Carracci, from British Collections, exhib. cat., Oxford, Ashmolean Museum and London, Hazlitt Gooden & Fox, 1996-97, p. 68, no. 28, reproduced