Portrait of a Hound in a Landscape, oil on canvas, 93 x 113 cm, framed

We are grateful to Dr. Francesco Petrucci for confirming the attribution of the present painting on the basis of a digital photograph.

The present, previously unknown, Portrait of a Hound in a Landscape, is a rare and important addition to the animal paintings of Michelangelo Pace. In terms of stylistic similarities, it may be compared with other paintings of a similar subject matter in the Chigi collection, to which it may perhaps once have originally belonged.

The largest collector of seventeenth-Century Roman dog portraits was Flavio Chigi (Siena 1631 – Rome 1693) the powerful cardinal-nephew of Pope Alexander VII who furnished his apartments in the Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia and Villa Versaglia in Formello with several paintings of this subject matter. The artist commissioned to produce this particular genre of paintings for the cardinal was Michelangelo Pace. The decoration of these apartments reflected their rural character and the cardinal’s passion for hunting, which was one of the important diversions of villa life at the time. Flavio Chigi’s accounts show that payments were made to Michelangelo Pace in June 1665 and January 1666 for twelve paintings of four spans in size featuring greyhounds, each “to be sent to his villa in Formello” (V. Golzio, Documenti artistici sul Seicento nell’archivio Chigi, Rome 1939, pp. 171-172). These accounts correspond to twelve paintings of similar subject matter that were listed in an inventory of 1693.

Four canvases by Michelangelo Pace that were part of the series still hang today in Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia in a room which took its name, “Sala dei cani” or “Hall of Dogs”, from these paintings (see A. Mignosi Tantillo, in: L’Arte per i papi e per i principi nella Campagna Romana, exhibition catalogue, Rome 1990, I, p. 108; Vatican Apostolic Library, Chigi Archive, nos. 20640, 20825).

A painting of Two Greyhounds with Views of Nemi and Porto Ercole by Michelangelo Pace is in Ariccia’s Museo del Barocco, a Greyhound canvas was with the Benucci Gallery (see F. Petrucci, Le Stanze del Cardinale, exhibition catalogue, Ariccia, Palazzo Chigi, Rome 2003, nos. 46-49, nos. 129–131), a Dog and Thorn Bush was exhibited at the Datrino Gallery in Rome in 2004/5. All of these paintings came from the Chigi collection, to which must also be added another Dog in a Landscape bearing the Chigi della Rovere coat-of-arms on its Collar (Christie’s, London, 6th July 2010, lot 9).

According to Petrucci, comparisons between these works and the present painting confirm that it is by the same hand. Petrucci argues that the neo-Venetian twilight landscape in this canvas derives from the influence of Pier Francesco Mola, who was tutor to Michelangelo Pace’s son, Giovan Battista Pace.

Michelangelo Pace was particularly celebrated as a painter of still lifes, and in particular of fruit, often in collaboration with figures such as Il Borgognone: He was described by the early 19th-Century art historian, Luigi Lanzi, as an “excellent painter of fruit, almost the Raphael of such paintings”. His corpus of work was discussed by Italo Faldi in 1966 (I dipinti chigiani di Michele e Giovan Battista Pace, in: Arte Antica e Moderna, 34-36, 1966, pp. 144-158), when he published the series of the four Ariccia paintings together with other paintings which up until then had only been known from archival documents and old inventories.

We are grateful to Dr. Francesco Petrucci for his help in cataloguing the present painting.