Hunting Scene

Tempesta Antonio

(Florence 1555 - Rome 1630)

The painting probably arrived in the collection as a direct purchase or a gift from the artist to Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The Florentine artist, Antonio Tempesta, became particularly famous for his paintings of hunting and battle scenes, dedicated to illustrious personalities in the pontifical court and the Roman patrician class. In this painting, which depicts a hunt involving a lion, tiger and elephant, what clearly emerges is the painter’s style, essentially that of a draughtsman, and at the same time, his ability to portray very small costumed figures.

Object details

Commentary

It is likely that this work came to Cardinal Scipione Borghese as a purchase or a direct commission, or as a gift from the artist, who worked for the papacy between 1615 and 1616. The painting is documented with certainty as being in the Borghese collection from the inventory of 1693: in it appears “a painting of about two palms on copper with a Hunting [scene] in it with men on Horseback with a dead tiger under the hooves of the Horse of No. 202 gilded frame by Tempesta”. Included in the inventory of c.1790 and in the fideicommissary inventory of 1833, this Hunting Scene on copper is a typical example of Antonio Tempesta’s painting. His work was so highly appreciated by his contemporaries that Giovanni Baglione wrote that “his works with horseback riding, hunting, and battles, for their great and beautiful diversity, and many forms of birds and beasts, are above admirable, and show the excellence of this century” (G. Baglione, The Lives of Painters, Sculptors, Architects and Carvers from the Pontificate of Gregory XIII in 1572 until the times of Pope Urban VIII in 1642), Rome 1642, p. 315). It is no coincidence that numerous works with hunting and battle scenes were executed by the Florentine painter, particularly for the Roman aristocracy, in the first decades of the 17th century (see F. Gatta, Alcuni inediti o poco noti dipinti a chiaroscuro di Antonio Tempesta dalle collezioni nobiliari romane del Seicento, in “Studi di Storia dell’arte”, 31, 2020, pp. 103-118). 

In the Borghese work on copper, the hunt for exotic animals such as elephants, tigers and lions takes place in the background, while in the foreground we see a group of characters on horseback dressed in oriental clothing and the dead tiger on the ground as described in the inventory of 1693. The artist skilfully depicts a series of techniques used to capture the animals - such as the lion being flushed out by the fire of burning torches and then impaled with spears, while the elephant is being circled and is also about to be speared. There is also a realistic depiction of some hunters who have been mauled to death by the felines attempting to defend themselves. This attention to detail is reminiscent of Tempesta’s series of etchings which meticulously illustrate various hunting techniques, Diversi modi di cattura degli uccelli [Different Ways of Catching Birds], today in the Albertina in Vienna. 

The attribution to Tempesta, unanimously accepted by critics, is fully in line with the painter’s style, which, according to Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani, is steeped in the ‘fervour of the design and stories given by nature’ (cit. in Baroncelli 2011). The proposed dating of the work to the years when the artist worked for Cardinal Borghese is based on the payments brought to light by Paola Della Pergola, in which, however, the subjects painted for the insatiable patron are not mentioned.

In those same years, Scipione Borghese was in the process of organising the works in his possession in the Villa he had built outside Porta Pinciana. There, the numerous landscapes with figures from his collection found ample space in a conceptual dialogue with the large surrounding park. 

Pier Ludovico Puddu