(Pistoia 1606–1681 Rom)
Venus, Cupid and Chronos,
oil on canvas, 224 x 307.5 cm, unframed

Provenance:
sale Sotheby’s, London, 4 July 1990, lot 120;
sale Semenzato, Venice, 8 November 1992, lot 65;
European Private Collection

Vividly rendered allegorical and historical subjects were Gimignani’s preferred genre. The artist has rendered the present scene with a sense of human life and empathy, almost like a family tragedy, with the bearded old Chronos harassing a nude young Cupid by plucking at his feathers, so that the infant cannot help crying and Venus, his mother, pleads for help. There are several versions of Venus, Cupid and Chronos – Allegory of the Transience of Love by Gimignani. The artist even dealt with the theme in a ceiling fresco for a Roman palace, where Venus, on a chariot drawn by doves, comes flying towards Chronos through the clouds in order to free Cupid from the arms of the old man, plucking the feathers from the child’s wings one by one. The fresco in the Palazzo Cavallerini in Rome dates from the 1660s. A very similar version of the subject, which is signed and dated 1664, is conserved in a Roman private collection. Upon comparison to other paintings from the 1660s, the present monumental version has to be dated to the same period, due to stylistic reasons.

Giacinto Gimignani, a student of Pietro da Cortona, was chiefly active in Rome from 1630 onwards, except for a lengthy sojourn in Florence during the 1650s. He left behind an extensive painted oeuvre, which, within the variegated panorama of Roman 17th-century painting and because of both its explicit classicist features and its colour scheme – inspired by Poussin and Alessandro Turchi – exhibits unmistakably personal features. Besides altarpieces for Roman churches, the artist worked for churches in Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna, Umbria, the Marches, and Naples.

We are grateful to Dr. Ursula Verena Fischer Pace for confirming the attribution of the present painting and for her help in cataloguing the work.