(Rome 1694–1740)
The Muse Euterpe,
oil on canvas, 50 x 64 cm, framed

Provenance:
Collection Anngret (Anngart?) Ehrlich, Karlsruhe;
Galerie Heinemann, Munich, August 1937;
sale, Carl Eugen Pongs, Düsseldorf, 10 December 1937, lot 7;
sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 2 April 1941, lot 6;
with Paul Hofstätter, Vienna;
sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 5 December 1961, lot 9;
Private collection, Germany

Literature:
G. Sestieri, Repertorio della Pittura Romana della fine del Seicento e del Settecento, Turin 1994, vol. I, p. 29

We are grateful to Francesco Petrucci for confirming the attribution.
A written certificate accompanies the present painting.

It has not been possible to determine the early provenance of the present painting. In a list of works executed by the mosaic artist Pietro Paolo Cristofari, ‘due Muse di Pietro Bianchi che mons. Altoviti portò fuori’ are recorded as having been acquired by Philip V, King of Spain (see F. M. G. Branchetti Buonocore, Cristofari Pietro Paolo, in: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 31, 1985). In his biography of the artist, Giuseppe Ratti mentions ‘al Cavalier Cristofori dipinse due Muse in mezze figure, che esso Cristofori ritrasse egregiamente in musaico. Questi musaici furono donati al re di Spagna’ (see C. G. Ratti/R. Soprani, Delle vite di pittori, scultori ed architetti genovesi, vol. II, 1769, p. 299).

The present painting, which was last on the market in these rooms in 1961, then bearing a later added signature and accompanied by a certificate by Hermann Voss, dated 21 January 1960 was offered together with a second ‘muse’ (then lot 10; see G. Sestieri, Repertorio della Pittura Romana della fine del Seicento e del Settecento, vol. 3, Turin 1994, I, p. 29), and it could quite possibly be the prime version of this composition, acquired by the King of Spain. In his report, Petrucci relates the pair acquired for the Spanish royal collections to a payment made in 1728 (A. Aterido/J. Martínez Cuesta/J. J. Pérez Preciado, Inventarios reales colecciones de pinturas de Felipe V e Isabel Farnesio, I, Madrid 2004, p. 171), and dates the present painting to around that year. However, the subject was a very successful one. The painting in Philipps V’s collection could have also remained in Spain, where they would, quite possibly, have been destroyed in the fire of the palace of Alcazar. A set of Muses was also recorded in Bianchi’s inheritance inventory (see A. Pampalone, Pietro Bianchi tra Arcadia e neoclassicismo. Un quadro inedito e riflessioni sul rapporto pittura-scultura, in: Storia dell’Arte, no. 84, 1995, pp. 244-268, p. 267).

Two other autograph versions of the composition exist: one, formerly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which was sold at Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet on 17th of June 1986 (lot 1, oil on canvas, 48 x 59 cm, see: K. Baetjer, European Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum, New York 1980, I, p. 11; II, p. 103), and another one in the Koelliker collection in Milan.

Bianchi was apprenticed to the painter Giacomo Triga (Rome 1674-1746) and then, when the latter left to complete his own training in Venice, Bianchi moved to the studio of Giovanni Battista Gaulli; there he acquired his nickname ‘Il Creatura’ on account of his youth and small stature. In 1709, when Gaulli died, Bianchi moved to Giuseppe Ghezzi. He found Ghezzi too theoretically orientated, but finally found a suitable master in Benedetto Luti, whose tradition he was to continue. He won several prizes from the Accademia di San Luca during these years, and in 1713 he was celebrated for a magnificent drawing of the Miracle of Saint Pius V (Rome, Galleria Accademia di San Luca).