The Judgement of Paris

Attributed to Locatelli Pietro

(Rome, c. 1637 - Rome, 1710)

This small work on copper was first documented as forming part of the Borghese Collection in 1763. It was painted by Pietro Lucatelli in the context of the decorative programme for the Casino del Graziano, a small structure at the edge of the park which Scipione Borghese purchased in 1616. It depicts the Trojan prince Paris as he offers the apple of discord to Aphrodite, here portrayed in a pink gown. Next to her are Cupid and the bellicose Ares, the god of war, dressed in a suit of armour and a red mantle. On the right, we see Hera, wife of Zeus; Athena, the goddess of wisdom; and Helen, wife of Menelaus, who according to Greek mythology was the most beautiful woman in the world.

Object details

Commentary

Paola della Pergola (1959) identified this work on copper as one of the ‘six small works on panel depicting the deeds of Diana, by Pietro Locatelli, student of Pietro da Cortona’. This entry is found in the 1763 inventory of works held at the Casino del Graziano, a small structure that previously belonged to the jurist Stefano Graziani, who sold it to Scipione Borghese in 1616.

Together with Diana’s Hunt (inv. no. 531), the work appears in the 1785 inventory with the proper description. The 1790 inventory, however, attributed the work to Filippo Lauri, an error repeated in the 1833 Inventario Fidecommissario and again by Giovanni Piancastelli (1891) and in Adolfo Venturi’s catalogue (1893). It was only rejected in 1929, when Roberto Longhi argued that the two small works on copper were by ‘a mediocre painter of the late 18th century’, without proposing a name. Following the discovery of two inventories of the Casino del Graziano, Paola della Pergola (1959) made the proper attribution to Pietro Locatelli, a view accepted by all subsequent critics (see, most recently, Herrmann Fiore 2006).

We have little information about the painter of Roman origin. In all likelihood he trained in the workshop of Pietro da Cortona, with whom he worked on the great decorative programmes in Rome. During his apprenticeship, he made the acquaintance of Ciro Ferri, who became his friend and collaborator. As critics have pointed out (see Manieri Elia 1997), Locatelli painted the vault of the so-called Scarabattoli Room for the Borghese family, which the inventory of 1762 described in these words: ‘all painted on canvas [...] with chiaroscuro decorations, with a black-ground frame below with gilded arabesques, its corners likewise gilded, and each with an ostrich egg’. He executed this work together with several paintings, including the one in question, which forms part of a cycle depicting ‘various episodes of Diana’ (Inv. 1762, c. 160). This work is consistent with others of the painter’s oeuvre: forged in Cortona, his style seems to anticipate several typical approaches of 18th-century painting which ‘in fact simplify Pietro da Cortona’s pictorial dilemma’ (see Fagiolo dell'Arco 2001).

Antonio Iommelli