A drawing of several male and one female mythological figures. This is the centre-left portion of a circular composition about 450mm in diameter, of which the centre-right portion is in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan. The circular format of the design and the articulation of the pictorial space entirely through the figuration suggest that the drawing is a study for metalwork, presumably a large display salver.

The subject of this design has eluded interpretation. The two fragments together show a colossal woman at the centre, over whose recumbent body swarm nude men brandishing what appear to be thunderbolts and spears. At her right shoulder stands a larger man who holds a lock of her hair and drives back the horde. In the left foreground is an equally colossal river god; at upper left a man holding a many-headed snake in his right hand seems to give darts to a group of kneeling men.

The drawing is in the closely hatched, densely figurated style of Girolamo Genga, whose name was apparently still attached to the drawing when it arrived in England in the seventeenth century. The sheet is inscribed at lower left in ink, in a seventeenth-century hand, ‘H. Groinger’, below what is probably the collector’s mark of Nicolas Lanier (Lugt 2885). 'H. Groinger' must be a corruption of Hieronymus (ie. Girolamo) Genga.

Other such designs by Genga include a drawing for a sauce-boat very similar in style and spirit in the British Museum (1946,0713.1487) and four studies for a swing-handle bucket in the Metropolitan Museum (49,19.65-68), one of which also features a river-god. Genga was a court artist in Urbino and thus would probably have produced such designs over many years; the early biographer Giorgio Vasari referred to designs in wax by Genga for drinking vessels for the Bishop of Sinigaglia and for the Duke of Urbino. Genga’s apparent lack of stylistic development and a paucity of reference points make it impossible to date the present drawing closely.

Text adapted from M. Clayton, Raphael and his Circle, 1999, no. 8.