The Family of Darius before Alexander the Great, Prisoners before a Senator

Author: Surya Stemerding

This drawing combines two scenes copied from frescoes by Polidoro da Caravaggio (1492-1543) in Rome. The paintings were part of a fresco cycle in grisaille that Polidoro da Caravaggio, together with Maturino da Firenze (1490-1528), painted on the façade of the fifteenth-century Palazzo Milesi in Via della Maschera d’Oro in 1526-27. Now, after the devastation during the Sack of Rome (1527) and five centuries of exposure to the elements, these frescoes have essentially disappeared. The compositions have survived, however, thanks to numerous copies by many, mostly unknown artists; the earliest copies were made as soon as the cycle was completed. The popularity of these frescoes among artists was due in part to Polidoro’s fame and in part to the public accessibility inherent in façade decorations.

The scenes in the drawing in Rotterdam are based on the second frieze painted above the first floor windows.^[1] The decorative vase on the far left corresponds to one of the vases in the frieze above the second window from the right.^[2] The central scene in the drawing is The Family of Darius before Alexander the Great, which appeared in the second frieze between the two right-hand windows on the first floor of the palazzo.^[3] The scene of prisoners being led before a senator, at the far right of the sheet, was also on the extreme right in the frieze.^[4] In the drawing, however, the ornamental field with two vases and a cuirass that separated the scenes from one another in the fresco has been omitted. Remarkably, we know of several sixteenth- and also seventeenth-century drawings in which the two scenes from this fresco have been combined in exactly the same way, departing from the original façade decoration.^[5]