Attributed to Agostino CARRACCI

(Bologna 1557 - Parma 1602)

A Fallen Soldier, after Raphael

Sold
Pen and brown ink.
Laid down on an 18th century mount.
Inscribed Carracci del on the reverse of the mount.
Further inscribed with a shelfmark H. 29, possibly that of Jonathan Richardson Senior, on the reverse of the mount.
195 x 193 mm. (7 3/4 x 7 5/8 in.)
 
This drawing is a copy of the figure of a fallen soldier in the centre foreground of Raphael’s monumental fresco of The Battle of Constantine (also known as The Battle of the Milvian Bridge) in the Sala di Costantino of the Vatican. Although Raphael produced a modello and various preparatory drawings for the project, he died before the work was begun, and the fresco was completed by his principal assistant, Giulio Romano, between 1520 and 1524. 



This drawing bears the collector’s mark of the journalist Mathias Polakovits (1921-1987), who assembled a fine and varied collection of Old Master drawings, mainly by French and Italian artists, over a period of about eighteen years. While the bulk of Polakovits’s collection of 17th and 18th century French drawings, numbering around three thousand sheets, was left to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1987, drawings by Italian artists and those of other schools were dispersed at auction in the late 1980s and beyond.

 

Provenance

Possibly Jonathan Richardson Senior, London (Lugt 2983 and 2984), with his shelfmark H. 29 on the reverse of the old mount
Possibly his sale, London, Christopher Cock, 22 January to 8 February 1747
Paul Mathias Polakovits, Paris (Lugt 3561)
Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 28 January 1998, lot 15 (unsold)
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s Olympia, 11 December 2002, lot 46
Christopher Powney
Thence by descent to a private collection.
 

Attributed to Agostino CARRACCI

A Fallen Soldier, after Raphael