Landscape with Abel Kneeling Before the Altar

Author: Surya Stemerding

Scenes of Abel kneeling at an altar with a burnt offering are rare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The artist of this work may have based it on a print by Marcantonio Raimondi (1480-before 1534) after painted examples by Raphael (1483-1520) in the Vatican loggie.^[1] The sketched octagonal framing of the scene suggests a design for a ceiling or a mural decoration.

The drawing had been registered since the 1920s as ‘Bolognese, second half sixteenth century’. In 1967 Byam Shaw was the first to suggest an attribution to Annibale Carracci.^[2] Its style fits his late work of 1605-07. In those years Francesco Albani (1578-1660), Annibale’s most important pupil, was working from designs by his master on a fresco cycle in the Palazzo Mattei di Giove in Rome. Below the ceiling piece of Jacob and Rachel at the Well there is a tondo painted by Albani with Abel on the left and another person by an altar on the right.^[3] Carracci is known to have made sketches and detailed studies for his pupils, many of which can be associated with commissions they were working on. Leaving aside the difference in the framing, the similarity to the fresco is too tenuous to regard the drawing as a design or even an initial sketch for it.