Radocsay Dénes - Gerevich Lászlóné szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 25. (Budapest,1964)

JAFFÉ, MICHAEL: Some Pen Drawings of Landscape with Figures by Annibale Carracci

70. After Annibale Carracci: Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Chatsworth, Devonshire Collections copied not only them but the bearded man on the pack mule (Fig. 65).

15 He noted this old man and the young people on the same piece of paper for convenience presumably: but presumably also to point up the anecdotal possibilities of the scene. Annibale's man on the mule seems indifferent to the party between the two trees over on the left. He looks ahead to party of travellers who are nearer the town than he. Grimaldi drew these travellers faithfully; but, in etching, he reduced the party to a single horseman. In both his drawings and in his print the man on the mule looks toward the card game; a mounted man, but a more pedestrian interpretation. His « invention» is limited to fussing over details: the turned-up brim of the feathered hat, and the dress and coiffure of the young woman ; the boy card-player who ogles the spectator instead of paying attention to the game; the ultimate suppression of the little opening below the machicolations. For the rest he has stolen what he could. What he could not steal by means of his heavily mannered calligraphy is the sense of light and warmth and atmosphere, the poetry of Annibale's conception. Annibale's « Landscape with the Card-Players » was copied at least one other time. This second copy, in the Pierpont Morgan Library, has been treated for some 15 BM. At10-48; black chalk, worked up with pen and brown ink, on white paper 117x238 mm. The numbering of the drawings (1 — 130) in the Vittoria album was done by William Young Ottley on May 17, 1833 (vide n. 12). I am grateful to the Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum for allowing me to publish these two Grimaldi drawings here.