GIUSEPPE BARTOLOMEO CHIARI | THE MUSE, ERATO

Anonymous sale, Paris, Audap & Mirabaud, 22 June 2011, lot 64 (as Attributed to Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari). 

A. Agresti, in Rome de Barocci à Fragonard: Tableaux et dessins du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 2013, pp. 50-55, cat. no. 11, reproduced.  

Paris, Galerie Tarantino, Rome de Barocci à Fragonard: Tableaux et dessins du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, 20 March - 8 June 2013, no. 11.  

A favored pupil of Carlo Maratta, Giuseppe Chiari enjoyed a widely successful career in Rome in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, garnering strong patronage from private collectors. This recently rediscovered unlined canvas, with its rich and meticulous details, records a successful composition of Chiari’s, the muse Erato, which is known in a few other examples, a testament to its appreciation among his clientele. Another version is today in the Hamilton collection, Lennoxdale,¹ and a variant by Chiari showing the full length muse is today in the Musée de Blanton.² All three of these works share stylistic affinities, and the face of the muse is found similarly repeated in a number of other examples by Chiari, including a Pieta in Burghley House and a Massacre of the Innocents in a private collection.³

1. Agresti 2013, p. 52, fig. 2. Clifford attributes the painting in Lennoxdale to Francesco Fernandi. 

2. Agresti 2013, p. 52, fig. 3.

3. Agresti, 2013, p. 53, figs. 4 and 5, respectively.