(Padua 1588–1649 Venice)
Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi,
oil on canvas, 111 x 132 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Piedmont;
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Bernard Aikema for confirming the attribution on the basis of a photograph and for his help in cataloguing this lot.

Alessandro Varotari worked in Venice during the first half of the seventeenth century. His manner is strongly characterised by a novel and systematic reorientation of Venetian Cinquecento painting, based on the work of Titian. In the present painting facial profiles schematically evoke those of early works by Titian but are also reminiscent of the classicising fashion which Padovanino had assumed during a stay in Rome.

The present painting relates to a work by Padovanino dated to the 1640s (see U. Ruggeri, Alessandro Varotari, detto il Padovanino, in: Saggi e Memorie di Storia dell’Arte, 16, 1988, p. 112, fig. 152).

This subject is taken from Valerius Maximus, Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri, IV, 4, written around CE 30 or 31, relating the story of Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio Africanus. Criticised by her female patrician friends for the simplicity of her dress, which was not in accordance to her high-born status, she retorted that her true wealth lay in her children. The subject was a popular one in baroque Venice and Padovanino himself had treated it before, in a composition now in the National Gallery, London, which is dated to about 1625 (see Ruggeri, op. cit., pp. 117-118 and fig. 51).