(Milan 1625–1696 Venice)
Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus,
oil on canvas, 145 x 178 cm, framed

Provenance:
Giusti del Giardino collection, Verona;
and thence by descent;
Private European collection;
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Fabrizio Magani for suggesting the attribution of the present painting and for his help in cataloguing this lot.

The present work is a celebration of the seasons symbolically represented by Ceres who wears the corn fronds of Summer and Bacchus who holds up the wine of Autumn. The goat-horned satyr on the right appears to help Bacchus with the grape harvest rather than spy the sleeping Venus. Outstretched among precious cast metal vases and dishes Venus and Cupid (inspired by the cherub in Raphael’s Madonna Sistina in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden) appear to slumber, inebriated.

The compostion of this painting reveals the influence of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus in Dresden, and especially that of Cervelli’s master Pietro Liberi. Here truthful naturalism is liberated in a profane and intriguing admiration of the nude, typical of Liberi. Emotive expressionism derived from the Roman school is here combined with a respect for Venetian classicism, and especially the paintings of Titian and Veronese, as well as those reminiscences of Michelangelo and Correggio, all of which are united by an overall chromatic accord. By the early 1660s Cervelli had established a prevalently profane repertoire of mythological and allegorical subjects in which an overt pleasure in sensuality and technical refinement prevails.

This painting can be considered among the last of Federico Cervelli’s works; it contains his trademark characteristics: fragile female physiognomies, graceful drawing, compositional skill in the rendering of rounded figures and especially in the depiction of heads, hands and feet as well as a sensitive and balanced deployment of chiaroscuro in the flesh tones. In this Venus, the figure is sculptural yet diaphanous: in his explicit description of the female nude he attains the triumph of the cult of beauty.

The present painting can be compared to other works by Federico Cervelli, such as the Venus, Ceres and Bacchus and the Bacchus and Ariadne both in Emilian private collections (see A. Pasian, Federico Cervelli ‘pittore di buona macchia’, in: Arte Veneta, 68, 2012, p. 116, figs. 2-3) and the large canvas with the Theological Virtues before the Virgin conserved in the Chiesa della Salute, Este (near Padua) as well as the Venus finding the body of Adonis in Palazzo Conti, Padua.

The work of Federico Cervelli was imitated by artists of the second generation of the seventeenth century. It is therefore not insignificant that this painter of Milanese origin has been singled out for his decisive role in the formation of Sebastiano Ricci. Indeed, in his Descrizione di tutte le pubbliche pitture della città di Venezia (1733) Anton Maria Zanetti writes of Cervelli as follows: ‘Ottiene anch’egli in questi tempi chiaro nome, per una certa buona macchia, e fluido modo di maneggiare il pennello’ [‘He too attains a renowned name in this age for his particular good manner and fluid style of handling the brush’].