Pietro Testa

Almost certainly Comte de Cossé-Brissac;
By whom sold, Paris, 9 December 1813, lot 14 ("Pietre Teste, La Descente d'Enée aux Enfers, représentée à l'instant où ce héros, accompagné de la Sibylle, se dispose à passer l'Achéron. Tableau exécuté avec la facilité qui caractérise les ouvrages de ce maître, sur toile, H. 60 p., Larg. 76 p."), for 151 frs to Mme Brissac;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 29 October 1980, lot 35;
There purchased by Piero Corsini;
From whom purchased by the present collector in 1983.

Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Cambridge, Massachusetts, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Pietro Testa 1612-1650, 5 November 1988 - 19 March 1989, cat. no. 127.

E. Cropper, in Pietro Testa 1612-1650, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia 1988, pp. 271-2, cat. no. 127, reproduced;
H. Brigstocke, "Pietro Testa, Cambridge Mass, Fogg Art Museum," exhibition review in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 1031, February 1989, p. 177;
“Dizionario biografico degli artisti” in M. Gregori and E. Schleier, ed., La pittura in Italia:  Il Seicento, Milan 1989, vol. 2, p. 900.

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 on canvas has a good European glue lining, which is nicely supporting the paint layer. The varnish is a little dull, but if it were slightly freshened, the work should be hung in its current condition. The canvas was originally made from two sections joined horizontally through the legs of the boatman on the left. There is a structural repair in the chest of the central male figure, one in his right elbow, and another to a horizontal break in the canvas between his hands. There is a similar horizontal repair between his knees. There is also another structural repair that has been retouched in, above, and below the elbow of the boatman. Under ultraviolet light, small and accurate restorations are visible here and there in the darker colors of the background; these are not concentrated in any particular area. There are a few retouches along the original canvas join. In the white gown of the female figure, there is some abrasion that has been attended to with retouches. The varnish could be freshened, and some adjustments could be made to the darkened restorations, or the work could be hung as is.
"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."

Aeneas on the Bank of the River Styx, one of Pietro Testa’s last works, is an awesome painting, in the true sense of the word.  The subject and scale shake us, forcing us to look at the larger themes of existence:  the definition of heroism, the purpose of life and the reality of death. Drawn from Virgil’s great epic, The Aeneid, Testa’s picture also highlights one of the central issues in our understanding of the artist – to what degree he was a classicist following closely in the tradition of Poussin or a wild-eyed genius following his own path.   Finally, because of its subject, Aeneas on the Bank of the River Styx is inextricably linked to Testa’s tumultuous life and tragic suicide in March 1650, when he drowned himself in the Tiber.

The story of Aeneas on the Bank of the River Styx is drawn from Book 6 of The Aeneid.  Aeneas, a hero of the Trojan War, deviates from his quest to establish a new kingdom (which would eventually become Rome) because he wants to go down to the Underworld to see his father Anchises, who recently died.  Aeneas begs help from the Cumaean Sybil, an oracle of Apollo who replies:

…the descent to the Underworld is easy.
Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide,
but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air –
there the struggle, there the labor lies…¹

In the face of his determination she relents and agrees to accompany him, explaining that in order to succeed he must fulfill two tasks beforehand:  the first to give proper burial to the herald Misenus and the second to pluck a golden bow from a tree that grows in the sacred grove.

In this painting Testa shows the moment when the hero and the Sybil reach the River Styx.  Charon, the boatman who ferries the souls across to the Underworld, appears in his barque and is both frightened and angry at the sight of them:  frightened by the fully armed Aeneas and angry at the very thought of taking a living being into the land of the dead.  However, the Sybil identifies her companion and the reason for his coming and then, to Charon's astonishment, offers him the golden bough:

At this, the heaving rage
subsides in his chest.  The Sibyl says no more.
The ferryman, marveling at the awesome gift,
the fateful branch unseen so many years,
swerves his dusky craft and approaches shore.
The souls already crouched at the long thwarts –
he brusquely thrusts them out, clearing the gangways,
quickly taking massive Aeneas aboard the little skiff.²

Aeneas is indeed massive as Testa paints him:  posed to show the broadness of his chest, made even larger by the cloak draped over his jutting elbow, Aeneas dominates the foreground, his helmet reaching up to the tree branches, the dim light reflecting off the plumes and the brim of the helmet and top of his cuirass.  Just behind him, her left hand on his shoulder, is the Sibyl.  She turns to face Charon and extending her right hand in a gesture that both reveals the small golden branch and serves as a sign for him to halt. The ferryman stops, balanced in his tiny craft, and points directly at the bough.  With his red eyes and wide-drawn mouth he seems to be somewhere between fear, rage and wonder.  Testa deviates from Virgil in his depiction of this figure, making him younger and showing him almost nude, rather than wearing a dirty, tattered cloak. By making Charon a more physically powerful figure and literally highlighting him and his reaction to the visitors, Testa emphasizes the drama and terror surrounding Aeneas’s journey.  In fact, the only recorded study for this painting is a drawing of Charon’s head, executed in black chalk on greyish-brown paper, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (see fig. 1).³  To the right of Aeneas is the pleading naked figure of Palinurus, his pilot, who survived the sinking of their ship but was killed by scavengers as he reached the shore.  He begs to be taken across the Styx, but as his corpse remains unburied he is forbidden.  His sickly pallor and supplicating gesture reflect his despair.

The large foreground figures are selectively lit and set against a darkened background.  Behind them at the left Testa loosely brushes in the cave where Cereberus, the monstrous three-headed dog guards the entrance to Hades.  To his right are those souls who died in unhappy circumstances:  premature death, falsely convicted and suicide.  Cropper has identified the rightmost figure, with his head in his hands, as a suicide who wants to return to the land of the living and contrasts him with Palinurus.⁴ Strikingly absent from Testa’s representation is a view of Elysium, where the heroes abide and where Aeneas will find his father.  The subject, as Testa has conceived it is fearsome rather than uplifting, while revealing the strength and bravery of Aeneas.  It has grandeur and restraint while not diminishing the powerful emotions it elicits. 

It is worth taking note of the circumstances of Testa’s life and the influences that brought him to his conception of Aeneas on the Bank of the River Styx.  Born in Lucca in 1612 and recorded in Rome by the mid- to late-1620s, Testa’s earliest success was as a draftsman, and his subjects were antiquities.  While in Rome he worked for Joachim Sandrart, the painter and biographer, providing drawings for the Galleria Giustiniani, an etched compendium of Vincenzo Giustiniani’s collection of classical sculpture.   By 1630 he was employed by Cassiano dal Pozzo to provide drawings of antiquities for his Museo cartaceo (Paper Museum), and it is through his connection with Dal Pozzo that he met Claude Lorrain, Dughet, François Du Quesnoy and, most notably Poussin, the driving force in bringing classical principles to the art of the day, acting as a counterweight to the extravagances of Baroque painting.  Testa, while well respected as a printmaker and draftsman, strove to make a name for himself as a history painter.  He joined the studio of Domenichino, and then, when the master moved to Naples in 1631, that of Pietro da Cortona.  Unfortunately, Testa was a self-absorbed and difficult pupil, and Cortona soon sent him away.  Testa’s paintings of the 1630s were conceived in a poetic, lyrical style, clearly reflecting the influence of Poussin but in the next decade moved toward a more severe, monumental approach.  His great chance for commercial success came with the commission for frescoes in S. Maria dell’Anima and S. Martinl ai Monti, both in Rome, but the first were deemed unsatisfactory and repainted by Jan Miel, and the latter were only partly completed before the commission was cancelled in 1647 or 48.  It is generally thought that these setbacks coupled with his own dark view of the world led Testa to focus on a different repertoire of subjects for his prints and paintings in the late 1640s.

Aeneas on the Bank of the River Styx stands in sharp contrast to Venus Giving Arms to Aeneas, an etching of circa 1638-40 also taken from The Aeneid.  In the earlier composition, Testa focuses on the generosity of Venus, the hero’s mother, and Aeneas's delight in the elaborate armor she has given him.  However, a decade later, when he was engaged with the present work, Testa’s views had darkened considerably.  Two other paintings from the late 1640s reflect this same more somber viewpoint: The Suicide of Dido, in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, and Alexander the Great Rescued from the River Cydnus, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The subject of the first is also from The Aeneid, Book 4. It depicts the death of Dido, the Queen of Carthage, who fell in love with Aeneas and  committed suicide when he deserted her, leaving the city at the direction of the gods.  It is a monumental painting, nearly 7 feet by 12 feet but in extremely poor condition.  The major elements of the composition can best be seen from an etching in reverse by Giovanni Cesare (see fig. 2).⁵  Dido is the physical center of the painting, but the true focus is on her retainers who discover her while she is still alive, shrieking and tearing their clothing at the sight. Testa even includes her faithful dog who tries to climb up on the pyre.  However, as grief-stricken as they are, the women retain a dignity and grace, never completely breaking the bounds inherent in Testa's classicistic conception.  Like the present work, it has a remarkable combination of terror and restraint.

The second painting, Alexander the Great Rescued from the River Cydnus (see fig. 3), is a more obscure subject and recorded in Quinus Curtius Rufus’s, History of Alexander, Book 3, Chapters 5-6.  The incident takes place during Alexander’s campaign against Darius III of Persia.  Suffering from the summer’s heat and the dust of the march, Alexander removes his clothing and jumps into the River Cydnus to cool off.  The water is so cold that he goes into shock, losing consciousness, and in order to save him from drowning, his soldiers grab him under the arms and pull him from the river.  It is hardly coincidental that Alexander’s naked body with its limp right arm and dangling legs mirror the pose of Christ’s in numerous Descents from the Cross, stressing the heroism of his possible sacrifice.   Although in this story Alexander is taken to his tent and recovers, the confluence of a river and death lead back to Aeneas on the Bank of the River Styx and seem to presage Testa’s own end.

Testa’s friends and early biographers denied that he committed suicide, undoubtedly so he could have a church burial.  Commentators in the 18^th century regarded him as a melancholic dreamer, lacking in rationality and judgment, while in the 20^th century opinion was reversed, and he was viewed as a gifted proto-Romantic, held back mainly by his long study of classicism.  However, as Cropper and Brigstocke have shown, he maintained a balance between classical restraint and strong emotionalism and by doing so was able to create works of intense power and impact.⁶ Aeneas on the Bank of the River Styx, with its grand themes and imposing stillness, exemplifies his paintings at their best.

1.  R. Fagels, trans., Virgil, The Aeneid, p. 186, Book 6, lines 149-152, London 2006.
2.  Ibid., p. 195, lines 466-470.
3.  See Literature, E. Cropper, p. 272.
4.  Ibid..
5. There is also a preparatory drawing in Museé du Louvre, Paris, which Cropper dates to circa 1648-50, ibid., p. 270.
6.  Ibid., pp.  and see Literature, H. Brigstocke, p. 175.