Giuseppe Cesari, called Cavaliere d'Arpino

Monsignor Costanzo Patrizi, Rome, circa 1624;
Private collection, Macerata;
Fabio Failla, Rome, by 1973.

Rome, Palazzo Venezia, Il Cavalier D’Arpino, June - July 1973, no. 31.

H. Röttgen, in Il Cavalier d’Arpino, exhibition catalogue, Rome 1973, pp. 109-110, no. 31; 
R. Ward Bissell, Artemisia Gentileschi and the authority of art, Pennsylvania State University Press 1999, pp. 248-249, reproduced, fig. 134; 
H. Röttgen, Il Cavaliere Giuseppe Cesari d’Arpino. Un grande pittore nello splendore della fama e nell’incostanza della fortuna, Rome 2002, pp. 113, 348, cat. no. 111, reproduced in color, fig. 61.

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is well restored. The picture should be hung in its current condition. The canvas has an Italian lining which is nicely stabilizing the paint layer. There is a vertical restoration running through the center of the work, which may correspond to the canvas being folded at some point. There are also restorations along the bottom edge. Elsewhere, restorations are small, concise and not numerous. They certainly are not an indication that the work is in anything but good condition, and the amount of restoration is the least one can expect from a painting of this period. The glazes and details of the work are still well preserved.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This boldly colored and highly sensual Venus and Cupid belongs to a group of easel pictures with specifically "eroto-mythological" subject matter, which Cavaliere d'Arpino produced early in his career, from circa 1600. He appears to have begun painting such works at about the time that he traveled to Paris as part of the legation of Pietro Aldobrandini. While in France, Arpino painted a number of pictures for the local market (although his contemporary biographer Carel van Mander notes pointedly "Quello che egli abbia dipinto in Francia, no lo so [What he painted in France, I don't know]"). Presumably along with the standard religious fare, he produced a few of these racier, and sexually explicit compositions. Among such works may be included a Jupiter and Antiope, sold New York, Sotheby's, 25 January 2001, lot 180; and a Diana and Actaeon (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. 250), a work which was almost certainly painted for a French patron, as it had most likely entered the famous Jabach collection within the lifetime of the artist, and had passed to the French royal collection by 1662.¹ 

The subject of Venus and Cupid is one of the most often repeated in Italian painting, though despite its established place in pictorial iconography, the sexually explicit overtones of this picture belie the commonality of the subject. In reality, the present work is among the most audacious examples of a mythological scene to be produced in Rome in the 17th century. Such titillating images had long been prized by Roman collectors (both secular and ecclesiastical), but the veneer of propriety had to be maintained; the papal rebuke of Agostino Carracci over his Lascivie, a series of sexually explicit prints that had outraged the church establishment, was still fresh in the mind of the entire artistic community of Rome. Despite its firmly established place in the tradition of mythological imagery, Arpino takes the sexual nature of the scene to  an unprecedented level. 

Röttgen has identified the model for this composition as a scene from the frescoed frieze in the Room of the Tapestries in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, depicting  Scipio’s Mother with Jupiter in the Guise of a Serpent. The fresco is dated 1544, and has traditionally been attributed to Daniele da Volterra or someone in his circle, and would have been familiar to Cesari as he was working on the decorations in the Apartamenti dei Conservatori of the palazzo at the same time as the present work.² 

The picture may be listed in the 1624 posthumous inventory of Costanzo Patrizi, pontifical treasurer of the Apostolic Camera, which identifies two paintings by  Cavaliere d’Arpino, either of which – though probably the latter -  may be this Venus and Cupid. Under the heading “Nell’altra stanza del guercio” are the descriptions of two paintings: “A picture of a Venus with a satire of Love by the hand of Cavalier Giuseppe with a gilded frame, 100 scudi”; and “Another of Venus and Cupid by the same hand with a frame decorated with gold, 200 scudi” (see A.M. Pedrocchi, Le stanze del tesoriere. La quadreria Patrizi: cultura senese nella storia del collezionismo romano del Seicento, Milan 2000, p. 387).

Herwarth Röttgen supports the attribution of the present painting to Cavaliere d'Arpino, and dates the canvas to circa 1602-3 (private correspondence). 


1. Röttgen dates the Louvre Diana and Acteon to circa 1602-3, thus contemporary with the present work.
2. Private correspondence with Herwarth Röttgen.