Fabrizio Chiari (1615 ca 1695) - Triumph of Venus,... Lot 36

Fabrizio Chiari (1615 ca 1695) - Triumph of Venus, 16th century h cm 171 x 176 Oil on canvas Expert opinion of Professor Claudio Strinati: "The painting depicting the so-called Homage to Venus (oil on canvas, 171 x 176 cm) is a copy of the highest quality and in a fairly good state of preservation of the famous painting by Titian Vecellio (currently in the Prado Museum in Madrid) known abantiquo both with the title of the Feast of Cupids (as it is sometimes still mentioned today) and with that, much more famous precisely, of Homage to Venus. Titian painted it for the alabaster Camerini of Alfonso |d' Este lord ofFerrara. He had prepared in the Ducal Palace of his city precisely a kind of marvelous studio to decorate which he invited some of the greatest Italian painters of his time, at the beginning of the 16th century. And among them Titian obviously stood out for incomparablefame andintrinsic greatness. "Homage to Venus" was a resounding success, so much so that it became one of the most beloved paintings by the artists themselves and by critics of art to the extent that it was copied by many of the most distinguished painters of Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries such as Rubens, Reni,Poussin! Our copy, here under review, probably dates to the samehistorical period in the midst of the "neovenetian" phase, as RobertoLonghi calls it in hisistudies on the Este court and its enormous influence. Dunquela our copymay date from about a hundred years later or a little more than the originaletizianesco executed around 1520, and refer to the ambienteromano who had a real cult towards the magnificence ofvenetian artwhen, in the eternal city, dominated the great painter andarchitect Pietro daCortona who, though Tuscan, was a devout follower of thevenetian masters of the sixteenth century. Among the many pupils and collaborators of Pietro daCortona who devoted themselves with special efforts to increase with their works this fascinating Venetian taste in Rome, I believe it is possible to identify the author of our copy. Considering the pictorial subject matter of our copy and the excellent quality of the drawing and of what could be called a true reinterpretation of Titian's style, I believe that the painter of the painting under consideration here was a specific follower of Cortona.), an artistalso well known in his time, a learned classicist and a lover of Venetian taste as seen in one of his masterpieces, the immense and beautiful fresco depicting the Reconciliation of Jacob and Esau in the so-called Gallery of Alexander VII at the Quirinal, painted in the 1750s. It seems to me that I recognize here the same hand that executed the magnificent copy under consideration here, of marked naturalistic taste, of very fine quality of the pictorial material and drawing, purely seventeenth-century.A painting, in short, of considerable historical-artistic interest and ofeccellente quality. In faith, Claudio Strinati." The work is accompanied by a pigment study carried out by the faculty of nuclear physics of Professor Paolo Romano, University of Catania, which certifies the nature of the pigments.