Lot 2019 Dα

Female figures had appeared unveiled in earlier Italian art, usually in subjects based on Greek and Roman mythology, but they had never before been invested with the same sensuality that the great Venetians, Giorgione, Palma and later Titian gave to them at the dawn of the XVI Century.

As noted by Professor Gentilini, the new iconography of the sleeping Venus spread after the publication of the much controversial Neoplatonic text The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), undoubtedly one of the pivotal references for the circulation of classical iconography in the Modern era. In one of its most famous xylographies, a sleeping nymph discovered by a satyr, the Greek inscription PANTON TOKADI, “To the genitrix of everyone/everything”, identifies the sleeping nymph with Venus genitrix, creating a correspondence between the theme of the nymph and that of Venus sleeping in a landscape, in an homage to the generative power of love in the midst of Nature's fecundity. The first and most famous example oft this new iconography is Giorgione´s Dresden Venus; Palma himself visited the subject several times, and the present painting certainly relates to the iconography above.

The painting can be traced ab antiquo and identified as the piece described in the post mortem inventory of the Palma Il Veccho, dating 1529, as “”a large painting on canvas with an almost finished nude”, while a second larger painting (a “tellero”) of the same subject, also unfinished. From the middle of the XIX century, the painting is recorded in the most distinguished and illustrious collections, displayed in London at the Royal Accademy and the Courtauld institute, finally landing in the property of one of American greatest collectors, Sir Paul Getty.

Palma il Vecchio, who established in Venice at the dawn of the XVI century, gained a great fame specializing in portraits and representations of young women, called „Belle”, who the artist often depicted in a balance between portrait and idealization, nuptial celebration and mythology.

Palma´s “Venus and Cupid in a Landscape” now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, is considered as the direct model of the present composition. If the Cambridge subject can be unequivocally identified with Venus thanks to traditional attributes and is therefore still linked to the late Quattrocento tradition, the present version shows an awareness of the new approach introduced by the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

Although Cupid and his traditional arms are missing, the figure can be unquestionably identified as Venus; the intrinsic innovation of the present painting resides in the fact that the woman, the Goddess, is completely taken out of the narrative frame in a total detachment from the traditional representation of the subject. Further, the addition of elements such as the pearls hair gear, the nuptial rings and the veil (an allegory of the woman offering her purity), her gaze towards the exterior and the receiver of the offering - her husband and patron - place her firmly in the XVI century rather than confining her to far mythology. After the countless beautiful young women disguised with the gestures, the attributes, here we have a Venus who openly presents herself as a bride. With the same intent, ten years later, with the famous Urbino painting by Titian for Guidobaldo della Rovere, the goddess - leaving the countryside behind - will land to Court and lie down on a bed to give lessons in love to an adolescent bride, understandably withdrawn.

The infrared reflectography shows an extremely good conservation of the canvas and almost no sign of modern restorations, and the typical “pentimenti” of the works of Palma; in particular, a different position of the legs that, in an earlier stage, were slightly more outstretched. The intaglio frame, original to the painting, is a masterpiece that can be ascribed to Mastro Jacopo da Bergamo, a woodcarver who was a friend of Palma: Mastro Jacopo probably took inspiration for the decor from the famous Ara Grimani, a roman marble of the first century a.C. which arrived in Venice as part of the collection Grimani in 1526.