Marcus Curtius on horseback leaping into the abyss
XVI century. Pencil, Grey-brown ink, Pencil ground on paper.Not on display
According to his biographer Soprani, Cambiaso painted a fresco of this subject on the façade of a house near the Ponte de´Calvi at Genoa, which was lost in the eighteenth century when the building was enlarged. A number of Cambiaso and Cambiaso studio drawings have been connected with the design of this decoration, including one in the Uffizi, Florence, another in the Victorian and Albert Museum, London (inv. no. Dyce 345); and a third formerly in the Instituto Jovellanos, Gijón. The Prado drawing is, however, rather different in composition from these three.
Turner, Nicholas, From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracc: a century of Italian drawings from the Prado, Virginia, Art Services International, 2008, p.266
