Attributed to Benvenuto Tisi

A camel pulls a chariot, strangely dressed men and fantastic animals file out through an archway, and the whole procession winds across a landscape seen from high above. The date 1528 is written on the door of the house in the foreground. The canvas is first recorded in 1610, in the collection of the Roman nobleman Paolo Savelli, and reached Cardinal Scipione Borghese around 1630.

Benvenuto Tisi, called Garofalo after his family's village, was for decades one of the leading painters of Ferrara, the city of the Este dukes, and he sometimes signed with a carnation, garofano in Italian. This picture has been given to the Dosso brothers and to Girolamo da Carpi, both Ferrarese painters, before the scholar Alessandra Pattanaro proposed Garofalo. The Galleria Borghese is cautious. Nothing else of this kind survives in his work and no document records a commission, so the museum prints his name followed by a question mark, which is exactly the doubt that attributed to expresses.