Lot 2139 Dα

The present work belongs to a group of studies depicting motifs from Trajan's Column which are traditionally seen as works by Poussin and included as such in most of his catalogue raisonnés. Anthony Blunt discovered that the studies were made in connection with Francesco Villamena's engravings for Alonso de Chacon's “Historia utriusque belle Dacici a Traiano Caesare gesti, ex simulachris quae in columna erusdem Romae visuntur collecta”, published in Rome in 1576 (A. Blunt, op. cit., p. 131 ff). He dates these sheets to around 1645 on stylistic grounds, to the time in which Poussin was also working on his second series of sacrament images (N. Harris/K. Oberhuber: Renaissance and Baroque Drawings from the collection of John and Alice Steiner, Ausstellungskatalog Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge 1977, p. 130-133).
However, Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat do not attribute these studies to Poussin in their catalogue raissoné of drawings from 1994. The series includes a drawing in the Szépmüvészeti Museum in Budapest (also formerly belonging to the collection of Joshua Reynolds and later of Prince Nikolaus Estherházy), a further drawing in private ownership and a sheet in the Munich graphics collection (P. Rosenberg/L. A. Prat, op. cit., Katalognummern R 211, R 542 and R 634). Rosenberg and Prat suggest that the drawings may instead have been made either by Pietro Testa or by a northern artist active in Rome.