With publishers inscription in plate lower right of “Ant Lafrery Roma” and lower left bottom “a Paulo Gratiano quesita.”. With Latin verses inscribed in plate below image. A fine later 16th century impression in fine condition on laid paper with an unidentified watermark, trimmed on or just within platemark at bottom, and with 1/8 margins other three sides. Also with expertly repaired crease at upper third of plate. Athough rejected by Boorsch, this anonymous engraving has been attribued to Girolamo Fagiuoli (active Bologna by 1539, d. 1574) by Voss and Borea, after a design by Francesco Salviati. Suzanne Boorsch, in her article “Salviati and Prints: The Question of Fagiuoli,” says that H. Voss (1912) identified three prints – Adam and Eve with the Infant Abel, Adam and Eve Mourning the Death of Abel, and The Flaying of Marsyas – as engravings to which Vasari referred in his “Life of Francesco Salviati” (1568) as being designed by Salviati and engraved by Fagiuoli. They had previously been attributed by G.K. Nagler and others to Philippe Soye, a Netherlandish pupil of Cornelis Cort. Little is known of Fagiuoli’s life, although he is said to be working for the publisher Salamanca by the late 1530s. Boorsch credits him with various prints designed by Primaticcio, Perino del Vaga and other artists. She finds significant stylistic distinctions in the three subject prints compared to the character of Fagiuoli’s restrained, controlled line-work, shadowing, figure design and overall form of images in these other prints. She therefore questions the attribution of the three prints to Fagiuoli as engraver and to Salviati as designer.

Paolo Graziani was a print dealer and publisher, active in Rome 1577, and he was employed in the shop of Antonio Lafreri as the chief plate printer (Masetti Zannini, 1981). After Claudio Duchetti’s death in 1583, Graziani was involved in the sale, to Peter Spranghers and Pietro de Nobili, of the plates that Duchetti, through his father Francesco, had inherited from Antonio Lafreri (Lincoln). Graziani’s address appears on prints from 1578 to 1583; among them are several ex-Lafreri plates inscribed ‘a Paulo Gratiano quaesita’ (that is to say ‘acquired by Paolo Graziani’). These ex-Lafreri plates are dated 1582 and 1583.