Figures unearthing a corpse, with other figures in the background, a city beyond

This and the following lot are part of a series of drawings of Old Testament subjects executed by Kempeneer in Brussels after 1563. All the drawings are of the same technique, size and figure type as the present ones. They are in Leiden; Courtauld Institute, London; Stanley Moss Collection, New York; Liège University; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge; and Frankfurt, and illustrated in N. Dacos, 'Peter de Kempeneer, Pedro Campana as a draughtsman', Master Drawings, 1988, XXV, 4, pls. 8-20. The numbering of the drawings, usually in the lower right corner, goes up to to 54. Nicolas Dacos suggested that the compositions of some of these drawings was inspired by engravings executed by Bernard Salomon, called le Petit Salomon, for a book published in Lyon in 1553. The book, an illustrated paraphrase of the Bible, circulated widely in the Netherlands and was translated into Latin, German, Spanish, English and Dutch.
Peter de Kempeneer was from a Brussels family of painters and tapestry designers. He studied under Bernard van Orley and by 1527 he was in Italy, where he stayed for about ten years. He is then recorded in Seville where he became the foremost artist of the city under the name of Pedro Campana. He painted a great number of altarpieces in Seville and Cordoba before returning to Brussels in 1563. There he replaced Michiel Coxie as the official painter and was put in charge of designing tapestry cartoons. Much of what is known about Campana today is recorded by the biographer Francisco Pacheco of Seville in his Libro de verdaderos retratos de ilustres y memorables varones published in 1599.