GAETANO GANDOLFI | The Judgement of Paris

Private collection, France.

The following condition report is provided by Henry Gentle who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: Gaetano Gandolfi Judgement of Paris Oil on canvas, 36" x 20" approx.. The unlined canvas is on its original strainer. The paint layer is raised and unstable with recent flaked loss visible down the right hand edge. Beneath a degraded and discoloured varnish the paint can be seen to be in good original condition with unadulterated paint texture . The colours saturate strongly. One or two minor restorations can be detected on top of the varnish. In very good preserved condition.
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This delightful unlined canvas is a rediscovered work by Gaetano Gandolfi, one of Bologna's leading eighteenth-century painters. The brushwork, freshness of impasto and bright colours are all entirely characteristic of the artist's maturity in the 1780s. It relates to a larger canvas of the same subject in the Molinari Pradelli collection, Bologna, and is almost entirely faithful to the larger design.¹ Professoressa Donatella Biagi Maino, to whom we are grateful for endorsing the attribution on the basis of a digital image, praises the high quality of the present work and suggests that it is a reduced, autograph repetition of the Molinari Pradelli canvas and is unlikely to be a bozzetto. She notes that the level of finish and dimensions surpass most preparatory works by Gandolfi, such as, for example, the oval canvas depicting the Annunciation sold in these Rooms, 4 July 2007, lot 58, and should thus instead be considered a finished second version of the Molinari Pradelli work. 

A small canvas of the same subject by Gandolfi, also in the Molinari Pradelli collection, has long been considered the bozzetto for the larger work.² While the spirit of the design and the general layout are absolutely consonant, there are many changes in the details of the disposition of the figures. Before the bozzetto was relined, an inscription on the back of the canvas was visible describing how in 1788 Gandolfi gave the work to his pupil Lussorio Bracci Cambini.

1 148 x 114 cm.; D. Biagi Maino, Gaetano Gandolfi, Turin 1995, p. 393, cat. no. 181, reproduced fig. 206.

2 45.3 x 31 cm.; Biagi Maino 1995, p. 393, cat. no. 180, reproduced fig. 205.