The construction of a classical temple, with groups of astrologers and architects, and a boar hunt in the foreground

The attribution has been kindly confirmed by Dr. Jrg Merz on the basis of a photograph. In a letter dated 7 May 1999, Dr. Merz suggests a date for the sheet of around 1630 and adds that 'the shorthand notes of the grass in the foreground and the foliage of the trees scattered on the mountain are also very characteristic'. Drawings with similar features are Cortona's Sacrifice to Pan in the Uffizi (J. Merz, Pietro da Cortona, Der Aufstieg zum fhrenden Maler im barocken Rom, Tbingen, 1991, fig. 213), and Sacrifice to Diana in the Victoria and Albert Museum, P. Ward-Jackson, Catalogue of the Italian Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum 17th-18th Centuries, London, 1980, II, fig. 678. The group of four men, two of them kneeling left and right of the celestial globe in the foreground is similar to an allegorical composition in the Albertina dating from the middle of the 1630s, V. Birke and J. Kertsz, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina, Vienna, 1992, I, inv. 904.
For a similar treatment of the landscape, compare a large sheet in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, The Reconstruction of the Temple of Fortuna at Palestrina, P. Dreyer, I grandi disegni italiani del Kupferstichkabinett di Berlino, Milan, 1979, fig. 40. Two landscape drawings by Cortona from Holkham were sold in these Rooms, 2 July 1991, lot 27-8.
Cortona executed two other drawings thematically related to the present sheet involving figures holding armillary spheres, maps and other measuring instruments, one which is in New York (J. Bean, 17th Century Italian Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1979, no. 135), and the other sold at Sotheby's London, 10 December 1968, lot 17. Both these drawings relate to the Barberini family and where executed at the time Cortona worked on the Barberini ceiling in 1633-9.