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Studies of warriors and hippocamps, after G.B. Ghisi with inscription 'Nic Poussin' black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown wash 275 x 207 mm. LITERATURE P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665, Catalogue raisonn‚ des dessins, Milan, 1994, II, under no. R899 (as lost). P. Rosenberg, Review of 'Paris XVII t h century French Drawings', The Burlington Magazine, CXLIII, May 2001, p. 314, fig. 82. NOTES The present drawing which has just come to light, along with two others in the Mus‚e Cond‚, Chantilly, and another in the Louvre, are partial copies which Poussin drew after details of the large engraving by G.B. Ghisi of The Trojans repelling the Greeks in their boats (P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, op. cit., nos. 178 and 182-3. The engraving records a design by Giulio Romano (Bartsch XXX, 20) copying an antique sarcophagus today in the Archaeological Museum in Venice. The drawings are dated by Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat to 1632-5. These four drawings, as well as others, reproduced by Rosenberg and Prat, were probably part of small albums of drawings in which Poussin copied antique motives from prints by Ghisi, M. Grecchi (after Polidoro da Caravaggio's Naval Battle ), N. B‚atrizet (from the Speculum Romanae ), Raimondi, Bartoli, Villamena and Fantuzzi. In these drawings Poussin extracted details from prints and assembled them in a different way on the sheets, sometimes introducing minor changes to harmonize the compositions such as in the Chantilly drawing. The purpose of these drawings, after the antique or after prints depicting the antique, was to create a corpus of ideas that Poussin could re-use while composing a picture. An old copy of the present drawing is in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, op. cit., no. R899 (see P. Rosenberg, op. cit., 2001, p. 314).