The Three Graces

Salimbeni Ventura

(Siena 1568 - 1613)

In the past, this canvas was attributed to Francesco Vanni and Rutilio Manetti; recently, however, it has once again been ascribed to Ventura Salimbeni. In all likelihood it once belonged to Monsignor Torquato Perotti, from whom it was acquired by the Borghese family before 1693. The work depicts the three Graces, deities associated with the worship of nature and vegetation. Alluding to the three-fold character of love, their embrace also refers to the gesture of offering and giving thanks. The scene is witnessed by Cupid and Anteros, the former flying through the sky armed with arrows, the latter resting on a rock, having set down his bow and quiver.

Object details

Commentary

The provenance of this painting is still unknown. According to Paola della Pergola (1959), it probably entered the Borghese Collection in 1607 together with a number of other works confiscated from Cavalier d’Arpino, whom Paul V’s fiscal police accused of illegal possession of firearms. This scholar indeed identified the canvas with the entry in the list of confiscated goods which generically describes ‘[a] small work with three figures of bacchanals, without a frame’. At the same time, Della Pergola (1959) noted the existence of a painting with a similar subject in Olimpia Aldobrandini’s 1626 inventory, which she believed refers to Raphael’s Three Graces, held today at the Museo Condè di Chantilly.

Although Della Pergola’s contention is no more than a hypothesis, critics have not called it into question. What we do know with certainty is that the work was at the Palazzo Borghese in Ripetta in 1693, as the inventory of that year lists ‘a small work on canvas, roughly one and a half palms high with three nude women embracing one another and a cherub in the air shooting an arrow at them and another cherub sleeping, no. 428, gilded frame, by Anibal Caracci’. While the 1790 inventory changed this attribution in favour of Domenichino, the 1833 Inventario Fidecommissario ascribed the work to the Sienese painter Francesco Vanni, a name that had already been put forth by Guglielmo della Valle in 1786 and repeated by Basilius von Ramdhor (1787) and Mariano Vasi (1792). A number of later critics also accepted the attribution to Vanni (Piancastelli 1891; A. Venturi 1893; Brandi 1931), although Roberto Longhi (1928) dissented, opting for a less specific early 17th-century Roman mannerist. For his part, Hermann Voss proposed Rutilio Manetti as the painter. His view was accepted by Della Pergola (1959) and Alessandro Bagnoli (1978), but rejected by Giancarlo Scavizzi (1959), who was the first critic to suggest Ventura Salimbeni.

It was Marco Gallo, however, who put an end to the debate. Not persuaded by the attribution to Rutilio Manetti, in 2010 he revived the name of Vanni. Three years later, though, he reassessed his own position after reconstructing the history of the work. He hypothesised its provenance from the collection of Monsignor Torquato Perotti, in which the canvas was regarded as a work by Ventura Salimbeni; it was indeed mentioned in a madrigal published by Antonio Bruni in Rome in 1633 (see Gallo 2013). Gallo’s thesis, then, excluded the possibility that it came from the collections of either Cavalier d'Arpino or Olimpia Aldobrandini. He received support for his theory from a recent discovery on the antiques market of a variation of the Borghese canvas (Dipinti antichi, Pandolfini Florence, 13 November 2018, lot 1), which was certainly executed by Salimbeni, who signed the work with his monogram in the lower right hand corner, specifically on the rock on which – as in the composition in question – the chubby cherub rests.

As Bagnoli (1978) noted, the canvas is connected to the sculpture group of the Three Graces in the Libreria Piccolomini in Siena. According to Erwin Panofsky (1939), the painter added the figures of Eros and Anteros to this model: while the former is depicted flying through the air as he is about to launch one of his dreaded arrows, the latter is asleep on a rock, having set down his bow and quiver. The centre of the scene, meanwhile, is set against a background in the style of Paul Bril, characterised by an elegant play of light; here the Three Graces – Aglaea, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, associated with nature and vegetation in Greek and Roman mythology – embrace to refer to the theme of offering and giving thanks (Wind 1971). By contrast, the Neoplatonic interpretation sees the trio of deities as the three faces of love – chastity, pleasure and beauty – linked therefore to the cult of Venus/Aphrodite.

Antonio Iommelli