Excerpted from Davis, Bruce. Master Drawings in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997, 35.
Von Aachen received his initial training in Cologne, but the most significant years of his education were spent in Italy. He was in Venice in 1574 and in Rome by the following year, where he became an active member of the large colony of northern artists. He remained in Italy until 1587, when he returned north of the Alps and commenced a successful career employed by the courts in Munich and Prague. Along with Joseph Heintz and Bartholomeus Spranger, Von Aachen was one of the principal and most influential exponents of Rudolfine mannerism, which was named after Emperor Rudolf II and his Prague court style of about 1600.
Because the inscription in the lower-left corner has been interpreted in the past as “S.R.,” the drawing was attributed to Salvator Rosa or Sebastiano Ricci. Konrad Oberhuber, however, attributed it to Von Aachen (letter, departmental files). The richly elaborated articulation of the figures, with parallel hatching in the shadows, dark accents with splotches of brown ink, tonal washes, and touches of white gouache, are characteristic of Von Aachen’s drawings from his Italian period. The crisp angularity of the drapery folds, the pools of shadow encircling the eye sockets, and the cocked positioning of the heads are found in other Von Aachen drawings of the 1580s, such as the Temptation of Christ in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,1 and The Judgment of Paris in the Albertina, Vienna.2
Notes
1. DaCosta Kaufmann, Drawings, 144, no. 51.
2. Pragum 1600: Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Kaiser Rudolfs II, exh. cat. (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1988), 2: 147, no. 608.
