Ludovico Carracci and his younger cousins, Agostino and Annibale, established an academy in Bologna that insisted on drawing from the life as the foundation of artistic practice. This is a study for the Sala d’Eneide in Palazzo Fava in Bologna, painted jointly by the Carracci, and depicts a companion of Aeneas crushing a harpy. The use of sticky oiled charcoal led Ludovico to simplify the form of the powerfully built figure.

Many of the works of Ludovico, Agostino and Annibale Carracci in Bologna were collaborations, including three friezes decorating the upper walls of rooms in the Palazzo Fava (now the Museo Civico Medievale), illustrating the stories of Europa, of Jason and the Argonauts, and of Aeneas. The present drawing is a study for one of the monochrome figure groups dividing the twelve narrative scenes in the frieze of the Sala d’Eneide and shows a companion of Aeneas crushing a harpy.

The Carracci’s biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia related that they received the initial commission because Antonio, father of Agostino and Annibale, was tailor to Count Filippo Fava, and that they agreed to carry out the work for a very low price. The date 1584 painted under the figure of Jupiter must be the terminus ante quem for the Jason frieze, and the Europa cycle was probably painted concurrently. There is no external evidence for the date of the frieze in the Sala d’Eneide; Malvasia’s description of the whole project implies that the Aeneas frieze followed straight on from that of Jason, but this has been questioned. Any date based on the style of the frieze is compromised by the condition of the fresco, and the chronology of Ludovico’s drawings in the 1580s and 1590s is not precise enough to allow a date to be determined on the basis of the few known preparatory studies for the project (including two compositional studies by Ludovico for the narrative scenes, recently discovered in Genoa); a couple of years either side of 1590 is likely, but it is not possible to be as precise as some scholars would claim.

Malvasia also stated that Fava commissioned Ludovico to execute the entire Aeneas cycle himself; that though Ludovico had wanted Agostino to execute the chiaroscuro ornamentation surrounding the narrative scenes, this was to no avail; and that he did manage to get Annibale to paint three sections on the basis of Ludovico’s designs. Ludovico’s responsibility for the majority of the cycle has been broadly accepted, with the caveats that Annibale was not a mere executant but contributed to the design of at least one of the scenes, and that Agostino did in fact have a hand in the execution of a couple of the scenes and some of the monochrome decoration.

Ludovico’s authorship of the present drawing and the corresponding figure group, however, has never been questioned in modern times. It has been seen as a prime example of his early chalk drawings, though it is in fact atypical of such sheets; the use of sticky oiled charcoal over an outline drawing in black chalk necessitated a simplification of the forms that is at odds with the usual careful modulation of Ludovico’s chalk nudes.

Catalogue entry adapted from The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque, London, 2007