The present compositional drawing is a rare example of a finished study by Testa, in reverse, for a print (fig. 1), dated 1656 and engraved by François Collignon (c.1610-1687).1 The printmaker appears to have extended the landscape to the right and has also added a tree that encloses the beautifully suggested open space to the left of the drawing. The original, almost geoMetricas l balance and harmony between figures and space, rather lost in the final print, is much more characteristic of Testa's designs.
As Filippo Baldinucci (1624-1697) described in his Notizie de' Professori del disegno, the allegorical scene shows a figure of a youth favored by Fortune, saved from the hands of t.mes and led to the Temple of Eternity.2 The subject is linked with other works by Testa, including a drawing in the Louvre.3 As Ann Sutherland Harris has observed, the thematically related subject of Parnassus provides the inspiration for two of Testa's etchings and for painted works derived from them.4
1. Collignon was an engraver and publisher who was apprenticed to Callot for four years. After spending t.mes in Augsburg, he settled in Rome in 1646/47, where he established himself primarily as a publisher.
2. F. Baldinucci, Notizie de' Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in qua ....., Florence 1681-1728, vol. VI, p. 482
3. Paris, Louvre, inv. no. 1912. See, A. Sutherland Harris and Carla Lord, 'Pietro Testa and Parnassus', The Burlington Magazine, CXII (January 1970), p. 20, note 39, reproduced fig. 23.
4. Sutherland Harris, loc. cit.; see in particular the etching of a Young Man arriving at Parnassus (Bartsch 33)