Carlo Maratti, Karel van Vogelaer, called Carlo dei Fiori or Distelbloom

Anonymous sale, Cologne, Van Ham, 21 November 2008, lot 552 (as Maratta).

We are grateful to Francesco Petrucci and Dario Beccarini for, independently, confirming the figure of Flora to be by Maratti, on the basis of photographs.  We are also grateful to Yuri Primarosa, also on the basis of photographs, for identifying the flowers to be by Karel van Vogelaer, one of the floral still life painters who collaborated with Maratti.  Paintings by Maratti depicting the subject of Flora are documented in several old inventories including that of Livio Odescalchi  (1713-14); Francesca Gommi (1711), the artists’s wife; and Marchese Niccolò Maria Pallavicini.¹

The pose of Flora is very close to that of the female figure by Maratti in Still Life with a Woman Picking Grapes in the Hermiatge Museum, St. Petersburg, which is a collaborative work by Maratti and Christian Berentz. 

This painting is accompanied by a copy of a photo-certificate from Wilhelm Suida, dated Zurich, September 1932, stating this painting to be a work by Carlo Maratti.

1.  See The Getty Provenance Index Databases, Item 1063, Archival Inventory I-629 (Odescalchi); D.L. Bershad, “The Newly Discovered Testament and Inventories of Carlo Maratti and His Wife Francesca (Gommi),” in Antologia di belli arti, no. 25-26 1985, p. 83; and S. Rudolph, Niccolò Maria Pallavicini, L’ascesa al Tempio della Virtù attraverso il Mecenatismo, Rome 1995, p. 87.