An Italian landscape with a town near an inlet

In 2011, in an essay on copies after drawings by Annibale Carracci, Catherine Loisel published a sheet by the French artist Charles Errard (1601-1689) now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France that reproduces the composition in the present drawing (inv. B 3b Rès. Pet. Fol.; C. Loisel, ‘L’apport des copies dessinées à la connaissance de l’œuvre d’Annibale Carracci’, in S. Bert-Schifferer and S. Ginzburg, Nuova luce su Annibale Carracci pp. 217-218, ill.). Loisel pointed out that the location of the original drawing by Annibale was unknown, but that, given the exactitude of Errard’s copies, the prototype would be easily identifiable. The drawing reproduced by Errard was most likely the present sheet, but it is interesting to note how the artist copied only the portion of the composition drawn in brown ink. As noted by Loisel, the motif of the trees with twisted trunks emerging near a pool of water occupies the left side of Annibale’s famous painting of the Flight into Egypt in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome.