Venus, Love And Dove

XVII Century, Emilian School

Venus, love and dove

Oil on canvas, cm 98 x 73.5

With frame, cm 113 x 89

The proud and enigmatic gaze facing the viewer, the sensually winking pose as well as the presence of a dove and a small whore, identified as Cupid, allow you to recognize in this enigmatic female figure the likeness of Venus, Goddess of Love and Beauty.

The author of this is an artist belonging to the Emilian pictorial school of the seventeenth century. For compositional and formal evidence it is possible to say that the painter was influenced by Carlo Cignani (Bologna 1628 - Forlì 1719), a famous student of Francesco Albani and one of the most renowned teachers of the Emilian seventeenth century, very close to the present painting with its Venus and cupid kept today at the Galleria Sabauda in Turin. Cignani, who propagated a language faithful to the canons of the Carracci’s Bolognese classicism, acquired and supported increasingly baroque forms, arriving at the appointment as prince of the Accademia di San Luca in 1710. Active in Bologna, then in Parma, he spent the last period of his career in Forlì, expanding the circuit of his students, who in turn were decisive in the codification of the late seventeenth and new eighteenth century taste all Emilia.

Regarding the present painting, as comparisons, it is impossible not to connect the heroic women painted by Elisabetta Sirani and her workshop of students, praised in the psychological type and technicalities used, in the present, to shape the volumes of the meats and to emerge feathers and crumpled robes of figures and animals. The comparisons creditable with the painting in question range from the Venus with Cupid of the aforementioned Sirani (BPEr Banca collection), more pompous baroque, to the Venus and Love by Gianandrea Sirani, father of Elisabetta, now kept in a private collection. A similar figurative treatment, although declined in a more languorous and less decisive presentation of the present, occurs in Venus with Love and puttini work anonymous Bolognese of the seventeenth century, protagonist of the same cultural temperament of our artist. If Marcantonio Franceschini adheres to these canons with a similar painting in private collection, with the canvas Pomona (private collection) and Venere e Cupido (G.M.B. Vignola, Emilia Romagna) reaches results of absolute similarity to the present.