Pietro Liberi

Acquired by the father of the present owner;
Thence by descent.

U. Ruggeri, Pietro e Marco Liberi. Pittori nella Venezia del Seicento, Rimini 1996, p. 169, cat. no. P 122, reproduced p. 170 (as location unknown).

This painting was only known from an old photograph in the Kunsthistorisches Institut archives in Florence and its re-emergence is therefore of particularly interest. Ruggeri, though knowing the painting only from photographs, confidently included it in his catalogue raisonné of the works of Pietro Liberi (see Literature). Ruggeri dates the painting, on stylistic grounds, to the mid-1660s, comparing it with Liberi's two paintings in Palazzo Pisani Moretta, Venice, showing Drunken Noah and Lot and his daughters (see Ruggeri, op. cit., p. 169, cat. nos. P 120 and P 121, both reproduced in colour on p. 41, figs. 46 and 47).