- Museum number
- Pp,4.53
- Description
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A Lupercalian Festival; three nude male figures standing to right, with beyond, a male and female figure near an altar on which a dog is being sacrificed
Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, on light-brown prepared paper
- Production date
- 1575-1609
- Dimensions
-
Height: 318 millimetres
-
Width: 264 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
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- Curator's comments
- This drawing was kept as a work by the French XVIIc painter Simon Vouet until Nicholas Turner identified it as an early study by Annibale Carracci for the painting on the chimney in the salon of the Palazzo Magnani, Bologna dated 1592. The room contains a frieze with scenes of the story of Romulus and the concluding episode, the feast of the 'ludi lupercali', is painted on the chimney. The feast is described in the ancient Roman author Plutarch at the end of his life of Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome. Each year at the 'ludi lupercali' the Romans celebrated the she-wolf who had saved the abandoned twins, Romulus and Remus, by bringing them up as her own. During the festivities animals, including a dog, would be sacrificed and then the priests, the 'lupercali', touched the foreheads of two noble youths with the bloody sacrificial knife. This blood was then wiped away with woollen rags soaked in milk. The 'lupercali' would then run through the city striking those who got in their way with belts made of goat's hide. Young women would deliberately ensure that they were lashed by the belt because it was believed that it facilitated conception and childbirth. The drawing sticks more closely to Plutrach's text while the finished work concentrates on a woman being whipped by one of the priests. The common factor in the two representations is the burning dog on the altar. The Magnani fresco is, according to some scholars such as Posner, not to by Annibale's hand, while others, such as Turner and Benati, think it is by him but obscured by later restoration. A later study for the fresco in the same technique as the present one, albeit much retouched by Michel Corneille II, is in the Louvre (Inv.7200; C. Loisel, 'Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins, Inventaire Général des Dessins Italiens, VII, Ludovico, Agostino, Annibale Carracci', Paris, 2004, no. 444).
Ann Sutherland Harris in her review of the Washington exhibition rejected this as Annibale, believing it to possibly the same hand responsible for the Chatsworth 'Assumption of the Virgin'. In her view both this and the Louvre drawings are copies after the fresco.
Lit.: N. Turner, 'Two unpublished drawings by Annibale Carracci in the British Museum', 'The Burlington Magazine', CXXXVII, 1995, pp. 609-11;C. Robertson and C. Whistler, in exhib. cat., Oxford, Ashmolean Museum and London, Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox, 'Drawings by the Carracci from British collections', 1996, no. 67; D. Benati, in exhib. cat., Washington, The National Gallery of Art, 'The drawings of Annibale Carracci', 1999, no. 14 (with further literature); A. Sutherland Harris, 'Review of Washington exhibition', "Master Drawings", XLIII, Winter 2005, p. 515 (as After Annibale Carracci)
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1996/7 Dec-Mar, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, 'Carracci', no. 67
1999/2000 Washington, NGA, Drawings of AC
- Acquisition date
- 1824
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- Pp,4.53
