Sleeping Venus

Attributed to Pennacchi Girolamo da Treviso II

(Treviso c. 1498 - Bologna 1544)

Attributed to Monogrammist HIRT-TV

active in northern Italy in the first half of the 16th century

The authorship of the painting, much disputed in the past as being by either Giovan Girolamo Savoldo or Girolamo da Treviso il Giovane, now seems to have been resolved by a third master, the so-called Monogrammista HIRT-TV, a painter from Treviso active in Bologna from the third decade of the 16th century and a leading artist in the anti-classical movement that inspired painting in the Po Valley in the 1520s. The subject, subtly hermetic and probably related to the engravings of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili [Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream], recalls the composition of Giorgione’s Dresden Venus; the fullness of the figure also recalls 15th-century models. In the typically Venetian background is a city shrouded in smoke, a probable metaphor for the passion, whose extinguished flames do not seem to affect Venus who sleeps on a white sheet laid on the bare earth.

Object details

Commentary

The painting’s history of attribution has been somewhat troubled. Documented in the Borghese collection from 1650 onwards, mentioned by Manilli in the Stanza della Zingara [Gypsy Room] as a work by Dosso Dossi (see Onori 2022, pp. 422-423, figs. 1-2), it is attributed to Pordenone in the 1693 inventory (Della Pergola 1964, p. 457, no. 306). In the 1790 inventory, however, the painting is attributed to Titian, and in the Fideicommissary Inventory of 1833, it appears under the name of Scarsellino. Drawing on an intuition by Venturi (1893), Longhi (1928), followed by Berenson (1936) and later by Della Pergola (1955), attributed the work to Giovan Girolamo Savoldo, identifying it as the “Large lying nude [...] by the hand of Jeronimo Savoldo Bressano” seen by Marcantonio Michiel in 1521 in the Casa Odoni in Venice. Since Coletti (1936) the canvas has been attributed to Girolamo da Treviso il Giovane by virtue of the identification of the painter’s signature in the inscription “HIERT” that appears in this and other paintings by the Treviso master, resolved as the initials of Hieronimus Tarvisio. In a recent study, however, Marco Tanzi (2024) has called this attribution into question, suggesting that the author of the painting could be the unknown Monogrammista HIR-TV, or a third Girolamo from Treviso whose complex personality, as already discerned by Ballarin (1966) and further explored by Mancini (2002) and Tanzi (2022), suggests a multitude of formal references between Veneto and Lombardy. The anonymous master, whose pseudonym arose from his use of the interwoven monogram HIR-TV or HIER-TV to sign his works, appears to have moved in circles “that saw the Cremonese Boccaccio Boccaccino and the Lodi-born Giovanni Agostino grow alongside Giorgione, with excellent influences from Milan, somewhere between Leonardo, Boltraffio and Bramantino” (Tanzi 2024, p. 40) giving expression to a culture shaped through influences from the Veneto area and Lombardy, with results close to those of Savoldo.

The Borghese Venus, which can be dated to around the middle of the first decade of the 16th century, is connected to the Giorgione tradition of “nudes” lying in a landscape - in particular, critics have identified the connection between types in the reclining female figure that appears in an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi taken from a work by Giorgione depicting the Inferno with Aeneas and Anchises (Ballarin 2016, III, p. XXX, table IV. 172). XXX, plate IV. 172) – with influences from the Lombard school that can be clearly seen in the sculptural nature of the forms, the bluish tones, the mother-of-pearl complexion of the reclining maiden, and the rarefied and suspended atmosphere.

The thesis put forward by the scholar opens up a series of interesting scenarios also with regard to identifying the painting’s protagonist, which has always been interpreted as a sleeping Venus. It could instead be based on an illustration from the famous Hypnerotomachia Poliphili [Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream] (Venice 1499) (cf. Tanzi 2024, p. 72, fig. 66).

Pending other hypotheses, the critical debate regarding the identity of the painting’s author is ongoing.

Elisa Martini