A Bacchic procession

While he may have misidentified the artist, the 18th Century owner of this lively sheet, the marquis de Calvière, already recognized that it was the work of two hands in his long inscription on the mount: one 16th Century Italian, the other 17th Century Flemish. Peter Paul Rubens was certainly the most famous Flemish artist who had the habit of retouching drawings by artists of previous generations to enhance their drama and three-dimensionality, but so did Erasmus Quellinus II, who undoubtedly followed the older artist in this practice. In the extensive retouching in bodycolour and pen in the present sheet, Quellinus’s manner and facial type can easily be recognized by comparing it to drawings and oil sketches by him, such as a signed oil sketch, a Design for a loggia celebrating the Treaty of Munster (most recently at Sotheby’s, London, 7 July 2011, lot 160; see J.-P. de Bruyn, Erasmus II Quellinus (1607-1678). De schilderijen, Freren, 1988, no. 111, ill.). The Italian drawing underlying Quellinus’s work is more difficult to identify; Calvière thought it was a drawing by Polidoro da Caravaggio, and the drawing could indeed be identical to a ‘Bachus triumph, Polidor’, mentioned in Quellinus’s estate (ibid., p. 324). A more cautious attribution of the original composition to an artist of Raphael’s circle, such as Giulio Romano (as suggested by Nathalie Strasser, op. cit.), seems preferable.