The Judgement of Solomon

Attributed to Foschi Pier Francesco

(Florence 1502 - 1567)

This panel, recorded in the Borghese Collection since 1790, has been attributed by critics to the Florentine artist Pier Francesco Foschi. The scene, with its rigorously symmetrical structure, depicts the mythical King Solomon, celebrated in the Bible for his proverbial wisdom. The sovereign, seated on a throne under a canopy, is summoned by two women, who after giving birth to their children – one of whom has died – appealed to the courts to claim the maternity of the one newborn child who is still alive. Not knowing the reality of the facts, the old king cleverly provokes the two mothers, deciding to have the little body of the surviving child equally divided into two parts. At this request, the true mother, moved by sincere love, renounced her right to the child by stopping the armed royal guard, unlike the other woman who, envious, had accepted decision, thus revealing her wicked plan.

Object details

Commentary

The provenance of this work is still unknown. In fact, the painting is first reported in the Borghese Collection in 1790, inventoried as a work by Franciabigio. This attribution, confirmed in the Fidecommisso (1833), was rejected by Morelli who in 1897 proposed Piero di Cosimo, whose name was unanimously accepted by all critics (Knapp 1899; Berenson 1903; Borenius in Crowe-Cavalcaselle 1914; De Rinaldis 1937; Langton Douglas 1946) and only partly by Adolfo Venturi (1893) and Ullmann (1894; Id. 1896). The attribution of the panel to the Florentine artist was unquestionably dismissed by Federico Zeri (in Della Pergola 1959; an opinion later shared by Bacci 1966; Id. 1977) who, comparing the Borghese painting with Pier Francesco Foschi’s Death of Laocoön (London, private collection), did not hesitate to assign The Judgement of Solomon to the latter, painted after, just like the London panel, Filippino Lippi’s half-destroyed frescoes at Poggio a Caiano. This hypothesis, promptly accepted by Paola della Pergola (1959), was however questioned by Zeri himself a few years later (Zeri 1962), who proposed to attribute the painting to the anonymous ‘Master of Serumido’ – an artist active in Florence in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century, whose identity is still unknown – while confirming the Filippino-Lippi model for the painting, executed, according to the scholar in keeping with ‘those modes typical of a proto-mannerist period close to Alonso Berruguete’ (Id.). This opinion, which has never been examined by scholars, has not been confirmed by Kristina Herrmann Fiore who in 2006 republished the work attributing it to Foschi.

Antonio Iommelli