Gaetano Gandolfi San Matteo della Decima near Bologna 1734 - 1802 Bologna

It is rare to find such an elaborate compositional drawing by Gaetano of a profane subject, but this theme obviously inspired his imagination.  It, and its pendant representing The Bath of Diana, clearly also caught the interest of Gaetano's son, Mauro Gandolfi:  in a letter of 21 December 1819, now in the Biblioteca Comunale, Bologna, Mauro wrote to a friend and colleague, the Bolognese Luigi Sedazzi, then in Milan, and asked him to make every effort to trace the two drawings: ' ...fare ogni diligente ricerca, se esistono tuttora  e presso di chi si trovino, due disegni di mio Padre all'apis rosso e gesso, rappresentanti l'uno il bagno di Diana, l'altro la nascita di Venere e Amore posti in una conchiglia sostenuta da vari Tritoni, con sul davanti degli amoretti che scherzano coi delfini. Servirono cotesti disegni a due quadri che dipinse per un Moscovita'. 

The two paintings to which Mauro refers, "painted for a Muscovite" on the basis of the drawings in question, are now in Kromer, Lithuania (see D. Biagi Maino, op. cit., cat. no. 121).  Two bozzetti relating to the same paintings are also known (fig. 1).  These were first published by Carlo Volpe, and were included in the important exhibition, Il Settecento emiliano, La Pittura, held in Bologna, Palazzi del Podestà e di Re Enzo, in 1979 (see D. Biagi Maino, op.cit., cat. nos. 120, 122, reproduced figs. 136, 137).  

Of the two paintings, the composition of the Birth of Venus is the most successful and coherent and it is interesting that Mauro, in his account of the drawings, gives a much more detailed and complete description of this composition than he does of the Bath of Diana.  One might, perhaps, conclude that he favoured the present drawing over its former companion, which is now lost.