Roman Officer addressing his soldiers (allocution)

Copy of a niello print from the Durazzo Collection, (n. 3009),  the original impression of which is now in the Cabinet Rothschild at the Louvre.

This is probably late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century Bolognese,  and is close in style to the niello-manner prints of Peregrino da Cesena. The subject and composition are derived, or perhaps directly copied, from an adlocutio scene on a Roman coin. Certain monumental Roman reliefs also offer various points for comparison, such as several of the Antonine reliefs on the Arch of Costantine.

The nielli of the Durazzo collection were reproduced in engravings by the owner himself, between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, in Venice - as also specified by Malaspina in his catalog of 1824 - constituting a series that was circulated and collected by amateurs. Bartsch describes these copies in his volume published in 1811, a date that therefore constitutes the terminus ante quem for the execution.