拍品 26
  • 26

多納托·克雷蒂

估價
200,000 - 300,000 USD
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招標截止

描述

  • Donato Creti
  • 《女預言家》
  • 油彩畫布,配原裝艾米利亞雕刻及鎏金木畫框
  • 28 1/4 x 23 1/8英寸;72.4 x 58.7公分

來源

Count Pietro Ercole Fava (died 1744), Palazzo Fava, Bologna, listed in the “Camera Dipinta dall’Albani” ("Donna con turbante che legge, in mezza figura, con cornice dorata, del Creti, L. 50."), and presumably thence by descent with the collection to Count Carlo Fava, Palazzo Fava, Bologna (died 1790).

出版

Inventory of the collection of Count Pietro Ercole Fava, drawn up in 1745 by Donato Creti, published by G. Campori, Raccolta di cataloghi ed inventari inediti, 1870, p. 603.

Condition

The following condition report has been provided by Alain Goldrach of Goldrach Restorations LLC., 122 East 92nd Street, New York, NY 10128, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. The painting was relined in the past with a paste adhesive onto a very open-weave canvas mounted onto a new stretcher of slightly different dimension than the originally intended sight dimension. The tacking edge appears to have been opened. Especially in width and less at top and bottom where one can still see the original canvas folded down. The edges of the painting have been filled and crudely retouched to up to 1"into the painting in places. The repaints are clearly visible under ultraviolet light as well as a few scattered retouches primarily in the upper background at left and the very discolored repairs in the proper left arm and forehead of the Sibyl. The retouches in the figure have been generously handled and are much larger than the actual damages they cover. The painting is in wonderful state of preservation and one can clearly see the marvelous handling of paint in light and shadows and in the rendering of form-in spite of the heavy smearing of dark brown watercolor all over the surface of the painting with a thicker layer at the bottom of the painting where it ran while drying. One can assume that it was done in order to lessen the visibility of the discolored retouches which indicates that the smear would have been applied long after the original restoration. However the"tone"is very soluble in a barely damp cotton and reveals the light and cool palette of the artist still under a yellow and discolored varnish. It goes without saying that the painting would greatly benefit from cleaning.
"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."

拍品資料及來源

This enchanting depiction of a beautiful young woman is a major addition to the corpus of Donato Creti, one of the most poetic painters of the Bolognese school and, with Marcantonio Franceschini, its last great proponent.  It depicts the figure of a Sibyl, an archetype that has deep roots in Bolognese art, perhaps most famously in the works of Reni, Guercino and Domenichino.  As in the versions of these older masters, Creti has painted his Sibyl wearing a turban (practically an iconographic shorthand for an exotic, oracular figure), and holding up a book.  He has chosen to paint her in profile, one of his favorite compositional devices, and one which allowed him to create idealized portraits of women of extreme elegance and originality.

The Sibyl would appear to be a relatively early work by Creti, dateable to the first decade of the 18th Century.  Its composition corresponds rather closely to the Cleopatra formerly in the Hercolani Fava Simonetti collection (fig. 1), which Renato Roli dated to the early 1700s.1 The Cleopatra, in turn, relates to a figure at the extreme left of one of the artist’s most famous pictures, the Alexander the Great threatened by his Father in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (inv. 1961.9.6), which has been given a likely dating of 1700-1705.  Thus, the present painting should date to about the same moment in the young artist’s career, the opening years of the new century.

Such a dating would also fit with the early provenance of the painting. Count Pietro Ercole Fava (1667/9-1744) was a member of one of the most important aristocratic families of Bologna which had a long history of supporting the arts.  He was also a talented dilettante painter,2 and a close friend of Donato Creti, who had studied with him in the studio of Lorenzo Pasinelli.  Fava and his father, Alessandro, would become early supporters of Creti, and in fact in the posthumous inventory of Pietro Ercole, drawn up in 1745 by the artist himself, there are listed over 100 paintings by Creti, as well as numerous drawings.  The first room of the inventory, the “Camera Dipinta dall’Albani” contained a number of works by the artist.  The second one listed, directly after the Alexander now in Washington, is a “Donna con turbante che legge, in mezza figura, con cornice dorata, del Creti."3  The painting was valued by Creti at 50 Bolognese lire, more than the Cleopatra mentioned above.  While the inventory contains no measurements for the paintings, the reverse of the frame of the present painting bears a brand and an inscription which ties the painting to the Fava family (figs. 1 and 2).

We are grateful to Prof. Daniele Benati who has confirmed the attribution to Creti based on photographs.

1. R. Roli, Donato Creti, 1967, p. 92.

2. Both Giampietro Zannetti and Luigi Crespi considered him important enough to devote biographies to him. 

3. “Woman with a turban who is reading, half length, with a gilt frame, by Creti.” Cf. Campori, op. cit., p. 603