A Battle Between Romans and Dacians (?)

Author: Klazina Botke

This drawing was made after a Roman relief and probably depicts the battle between the Romans and the Dacians, a people from present-day Romania.^[1] The so-called Dacian Wars (101-02 and 105-06 AD) took place during the period of office of Emperor Trajan (53-117) and were recorded on his triumphal column (107-112). From the mid-fifteenth century onwards the individual reliefs on this column attracted the interest of scholars and artists. Antonio Averlino Filarete (1400-1465/1469), among others, studied the works in detail and described a number of them in his Trattato d'architettura.^[2] Our drawing is a copy after a sheet in Paris, on which a larger scene is depicted.^[3] It is possible that our sheet was at some point cropped on the right hand side. According to Sylvia Ferino Pagden, the original composition is an invention by Pietro Perugino (1446/1447-1523), undoubtedly inspired by a Roman relief.^[4] In Washington there is another drawing with only the archer.^[5]

The scene is reminiscent of a relief with the same subject from the second century BC, originally at the Forum of Trajan and incorporated into the west side of the Arch of Constantine in the fourth century (completed in 315). The sculpture has been copied a number of times by, among others, Andrea Mantegna (1430/1431-1506) and Amico Aspertini (1474/1475-1552).^[6] Mantegna’s drawing in Vienna, made during his stay in Rome around 1488-89, is a close copy of the left-hand half of the relief, in which he also tried to capture the style of the sculpted figures.^[7] Aspertini focused on the right-hand half of the scene and his drawings, now in London, are typical of his personal style.^[8] Our drawing differs in one important respect from these two works: only the scene with the two horsemen at upper left bears any resemblance to the original relief on the Arch of Constantine.

It may be that our drawing is a composite, which was not unusual; in a fresco cycle in Palazzo Santoro in Bologna, for example, Jacopo Ripanda (active 1490-1530) combined classical examples with imaginary figures.^[9] We see a similar approach in drawings by the anonymous ‘Oxford Master’. These appear to be based on existing reliefs, but specific examples for them can almost never be found.^[10]

A number of figures in the Rotterdam drawing have been scored for transfer, probably in order to copy them onto another support. In addition, at some point the right-hand part of the scene has been cut off and restored. The putto drawn with red chalk at lower left must have been added to the sheet much later.