Mercury with Pegasus

Author: Giada Damen

This drawing represents the figures of Mercury and Pegasus depicted on the right hand side of Andrea Mantegna’s painting Parnassus now in Paris.^[1] Mantegna executed the painting in 1497 for the studiolo (study) of Isabella d’Este (1474-1539), Marchioness of Mantua and a leading patron of the arts in the early sixteenth century.

The drawing was published for the first time as an original work by the artist in 1907 when it was in the collection of Pierre Cloix at Montigny-sur-Loing.^[2] Also in that collection was a drawing of Mars and Venus, another detail from the same painting. Unfortunately the whereabouts of that sheet, executed in the same technique and by the same hand as the Mercury and Pegasus drawing, are now unknown.^[3]

In 1908 James Paton published the present drawing as a preparatory study for Mantegna’s painting, praising it as ‘quite superior to the finished group’.^[4] In the same year the sheet was offered as a gift to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. However, the drawing has since been understood as a later copy, probably of the eighteenth century. It is likely that the unknown draughtsman was copying a print rather than deriving the figures from Mantegna’s painting directly.