(Bologna 1603–1633 Rome)
The Vestal Tuccia,
oil on canvas, 106 x 145 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Reggio Emilia, since circa 1960

We are grateful to Francesca Cappelletti for suggesting the attribution and for her help in cataloguing the present painting.

The present painting, on ‘tela da imperatore’ [‘imperial sized canvas’], is on a scale consonant with works destined for an important collection, appropriate for display in palaces of the early seventeenth century. It represents the culminating moment, narrated by Livy, in the story of the Vestal Tuccia when the cult’s priestess is unjustly accused of losing her chastity. The episode is also reported by Valerius Maximus, who describes the marvel invoked by the priestess, wherein she presented herself before her judges bearing a sieve full of water drawn from the Tiber, from which not a drop fell. Thus, with the aid of the divinity the maiden demonstrated her innocence (Although numerous proceedings against the Vestals are in fact reported by Livy and by Pliny in the Naturalis Historia (XXVIII: 2 for Tuccia), Valerius Maximus appears to be the principal source for the Tuccia episode recounted in Factorum et dictorum memorabilium…VII:1:5. Another marvel, concerning the Vestal Claudia Quinta, was described by Ovid but not Livy and was an occasional painting subject).

In the present painting, the subject is set against a backdrop of grandiose Roman palaces, while the throne of the pontifex maximus, to whom the maiden shows the sieve, is framed by an ample drape secured to a broad fluted column. The figures do not appear to interact with each other, and only the features of the bearded man and the soldier to the right of the pontiff appear to show querying expressions of surprise at the scene. The elegant halberdier on the right, his hand on his hip, turned in three-quarter view to face the spectator, appears abstracted and distant from the episode represented in the painting.

A solemn tone, rather than one of restraint, emanates from the scene: it is an element that contributes to locating the painting within the ambit of a particular stylistic moment in Rome between the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century, when the imposing Baroque language of Pietro da Cortona co-habited with the Bolognese classicism and the even more severe and philological approach of Nicolas Poussin.

While the architectural setting and the elegance of the draped figures in the present painting appear to reveal a knowledge of Pietro da Cortona’s early works, the abstraction of the subject’s expressions points to the classical language of the early decades of the seventeenth century. It is not by chance that it is in this way close to the work of Giovan Battista Ruggeri, an artist whose Bolognese training occurred among the project sites of Domenichino’s pupils. Ruggeri was also a collaborator on Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Museum Cartaceum and was certainly in contact with painters that although being recognised for their affinity with the Emilian ambit and the sphere of the French at Rome, are, like François Perrier, nevertheless numbered among the ‘cortoneschi’ (see: F. Cappelletti, in F. Cappelletti/L. Testa, Il trattenimento di virtuosi. Le collezioni secentesche di quadri nei palazzo Mattei di Roma, Rome 1994, pp. 121-123, for a biography of Ruggeri and for the attribution to him of the two canvases in the Palazzo Barberini collection).

The present painting certainly belongs in the ambit of the Barberini’s orientation to the artistic debates of the day (on Cortona’s following in France and on the still valid consequences in France of the classical vs. baroque debate at the close of the 1620s, see the considerations of B. Gady, Una gloria senza fortuna: Pietro da Cortona e la Francia in: Pietro da Cortona, ed. by A. Lo Bianco, exhibition catalogue, Rome 1998, pp. 153-163 with previous bibliography), both on account of its rare choice of antique subject, and for its fidelity to the ancient literary source. It is also dense with stylistic references to the interests of the Roman antiquarian circle gathered round Cassiano dal Pozzo and Francesco Barberini, which would later become the terrain for the development of Charles Errard and Pierre and Nicolas Mignard’s refined style of painting.

In the Vestal Tuccia the full and foreshortened features of the maiden point to Emilian models, while the elegant detachedness of the halberdier appears to anticipate the classicising and suspended world of Giacinto Giminiani.

The work’s compositional assonance and the choice of the all’antica subject indicate the authorship of Giovan Battista Ruggeri, called Battistino del Gessi. He is a fascinating and still mysterious artist (for example his date of decease has only recently been confirmed to 1633 on the basis of documentary evidence; see: A. Perri, La data di morte di Giovan Battista Ruggeri in: Decorazione e collezionismo a Roma nel Seicento, ed. by F. Cappelletti, Rome n.d. [2003], pp. 107-112), who drew antiquities, collaborated with François Perrier and was active for Vincenzo Giustiniani, for whom he executed the canvas of Moses before the Pharaoh at Potsdam. In the latter painting, as in the David and Abigail now at Palazzo Barberini (formerly in the Santacroce and Mattei collections), the background figures of soldiers and bystanders are very similar to those in our painting: they are shown frontally, their distance from the picture-plane conferred by an attenuation of colour in contrast to the amply draped foreground figures. The solemnity of the scene (noted above) and the insinuation of a semi-circular disposition to the figures also recall the Continence of Scipio, the pendant to the David and Abigail, which is the canvas that shares the most compositional similarities to our Vestal Tuccia.