- 153
Corrado Giaquinto
Description
- Corrado Giaquinto
- Medea Rejuvenating Aeson
- signed and inscribed by the artist on the reverse: Arazzi/ Medea/ CG.
oil on unlined canvas
Condition
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Catalogue Note
Called by Ferdinand VI in 1753 to the court of Madrid, Corrado Giaquinto was to spend nearly a decade in Spain, years that were to be amongst the most productive, creative, and influential of his career. His position as the preeminent artistic figure in the country was confirmed by his appointment as Primer Pintor del Rey as well as director of the Academia di San Fernando, newly formed by the art-loving Ferdinand. Almost all official artistic endeavors during his time in Spain were either supervised, approved or undertaken by Giaquinto, and as a result his style would exercise considerable influence on the younger generation of his fellow painters, including? amongst others? the young Francisco de Goya. Along with his many roles at court, Giaquinto was also charged with the running of the Real Fábrica de Tapices y Alfombras de Santa Bárbara, the royal Spanish tapestry factory, located in Madrid. There, in addition to more mundane responsibilities, he was charged with creating designs for manufacture, just as his immediate successors Mengs, and most famously Goya, would be later.1 The inscription "Arazzi" on the reverse of the canvas, in the artist's own hand, confirms that the present painting is a design for just such a wall-hanging, apparently never produced.
The painting of bozzetti for many of his projects was typical of Giaquinto, and during his Spanish sojourn they became particularly free and immediate in their handling. Using a gray ground, he painted rapidly but surely in bright colors, and his oil studies of these years have a particular beauty. A number of other such studies have also survived unlined, and also bear similar inscriptions like the present canvas and in a similar order: the place or project for which they were intended, the subject, and finally the artist's signature in initials.2 Such care appears to have been typical of Giaquinto who was working simultaneously on numerous projects. The subject of the present painting is derived from Ovid's Metamorphoses, book 7, when the sorceress Medea calls upon various deities to rejuvenate the father of her lover, Jason.
1. For a discussion of some of Giaquinto's activity with the Santa Barbara factory, please see L. de Frutos Sastre, "Giaquinto copista y Giaquinto copiado: Participación de Corrado Giaquinto en la Real Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara," in Corrado Giaquinto y España, exhibition catalogue, Madrid 2006, pp. 57-73.
2. These include a number of paintings still in the Spanish Royal collections (split between the Casita del Prínicpe, Escorial and the Palace of Zarzuela) amongst them a set of oil studies of Virtues and Muses which Corrado painted as designs for the decoration of the Escalera Principal in the Palacio Real, Madrid (see Madrid exhibition op. cit., p. 229 passim).