Seated Harpy

Author: Surya Stemerding

This figure study is related to a twelve-part fresco cycle of Virgil’s Aeneid (18 BC) in Palazzo Fava in Bologna. The paintings were executed between 1585 and 1593 by the brothers Annibale (1560-1609) and Agostino Carracci (1557-1602), and their cousin Lodovico Carracci. This harpy is regarded as a primo pensiero (first thought) for one of the figures in the tenth scene of the cycle. It relates to the event in which the meal being enjoyed by Aeneas and Phineus is disturbed by the harpies, the terrifying winged daughters of Electra and Thaumas, who were dispatched to make Phineus’s life a misery. The scene was painted by Annibale but designed in collaboration with Lodovico, who made this drawing.^[1] The seated harpy does not feature in this form in the fresco, but as Bohn (2004) argued, was eventually rejected. The version chosen in the finished fresco was a harpy in a more dynamic pose hovering in an altercation with a standing figure that was based on one or more alternative preliminary studies. One of these drawings, a black chalk drawing of a male torso by Lodovico, has survived and is now in Amsterdam.^[2]

The attribution to Lodovico is generally accepted. It took some time for his skill as a draughtsman to be recognized.^[3] Much of his drawn oeuvre was long regarded as the work of Annibale, and it was wrongly assumed that the distinctively ‘Carraccesque’ naturalism and Classicism was solely a hallmark of Annibale. Lodovico’s surviving chalk drawings are mainly full or half-lengths, like the Seated Harpy in Rotterdam.