Lot 2: Girolamo Sellari, called Girolamo di Carpi (Carpi 1501-1556 Ferrara)

Priests leading a bull, a ram and a boar to an altar, after the Antique
with inscriptions 'No-244', 'b', '10 franco' and 'Bo+' (twice) on the former mount
black chalk, pen and brown ink on light brown paper
7 7/8 x 13 1/2 in. (199 x 342 mm.)

Paris, Galerie Aubry, Dessins du XVI^e et XVII^e dans les collections privées françaises, 1971, no. 26.
Paris, Musée du Louvre, Dominique-Vivant Denon, l'oeil de Napoléon, 1999, no. 548.

A. Duval, Monuments des Arts du Dessin..., Paris, 1829, II, pl. 103 (as Polidoro da Caravaggio).
P. Bober and R. Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, London, 1986, p. 223, under no. 190.

Baron Dominique-Vivant Denon (L.779); Paris, 1-19 May 1826, probably lot 280 (as Franco, 31.50 francs to Remoisenet).
Pierre Defer, by descent to
Henri Dumesnil (L. 739).
A. Normand (L. 153c).
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 9 July 2002, lot 2.

The attribution to Girolamo da Carpi was suggested to Alfred Normand by Philip Pouncey, with reference to a group of drawings after the antique from Carpi's studio now in the British Museum (J. Gere and P. Pouncey, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Artists working in Rome, London, 1983, nos. 154-163).
The drawing records, through the prism of Girolamo da Carpi's aesthetic sensibility, a Julio-Claudian relief of the sacrifice of the suovetaurilia rediscovered in the late 15th Century. In the mid 16th Century it was in the collection of the Venetian Cardinal Domenico Grimani in Rome, where Carpi must have seen it. After 1586 it was taken to Venice where it remained until it was plundered by Napoleon's troops in 1797. Despite specific attempts by Venice for it to be repatriated after Waterloo it remained in the Louvre, almost certainly though the determination of its director, Dominique-Vivant Denon. Denon's regard for the piece is reflected in his ownership of the present drawing.