(Florence 1666–1724 Rome)
after Artemisia Gentileschi
Susanna and the Elders,
oil on canvas, 170 x 116 cm, framed

Provenance:
commissioned by Benedetto Luti for Johann Alberich Bauer von Heppenstein, Court Councillor of Lothar Franz von Schönborn;
art market, Germany;
Private European collection

Literature:
R. Maffeis, L’importanza di firmarsi Artemisia. Su una ‘Susanna’ della Gentileschi nella collezione di Benedetto Luti, in: Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 3, 2017, pp. 389–407, fig. 2

The present painting is the only known copy of the canvas of identical subject and dimensions made by the young Artemisia Gentileschi in 1610, and currently conserved in the castle of Weissenstein at Pommersfelden in upper Franconia of the count Schönborn.

The painting under discussion is with all probability to be identified as the canvas that the Florentine painter Benedetto Luti commissioned of his studio in the summer of 1714, after the original that belonged in the artist’s collection. Variously talented, Luti was not only an artist of great fame but also an art dealer, a connoisseur and a collector. In this period, at the apogee of his career, he was ambitious to attain the title of Knight of the Holy Roman Empire, which his patron and protector Lothar Franz von Schönborn, archbishop of Mainz, would have been able to procure him from the Emperor in recognition of his merits as an artist. To this end Luti had decided to make a gift of his canvas by Artemisia to the archbishop, knowing his patron’s predilection for paintings representing the female nude, so long as they were decent.

From a series of letters from Luti to Schönborn’s court councillor, Johann Alberich Bauer von Heppenstein (see literature), it emerges that the artist had commissioned a copy of the painting by Artemisia to send to the latter so as to receive his opinion with regard the appropriateness, or lack thereof, of the original as a gift to the archbishop. The reply was favourable and the original was duly sent to the castle where it still remains today, the copy was left to the councillor as a gift, while in 1715 Luti received the diamond studded cross that was the emblem of the honour he had received.

The reason why Luti decided to send a copy of the Susanna and the Elders in advance is explained by the artist himself in the above mentioned letters: the original was difficult to transport given the dense thickness of the rigid impasto on the canvas, which made it impossible to role without it being damaged. However, as Rodolfo Maffeis (see literature) has proposed, it is likely that given the explicitly erotic nature of the work, Luti was at odds with his desire to second his patron’s tastes, with misgivings of offending him. Thus he felt the need of attaining preliminary approval from Heppenstein, not so much on the quality of the painting concerning which Luti had no doubts, but rather on the appropriateness of the gift.

Luti was familiar with the execution of copies after famous paintings and when he entrusted them to his studio, from time to time he personally intervened with various finishing touches. It should not therefore be excluded, according to Maffeis (see literature), that the painting under discussion does not bear partial interventions by the artist, although in his letters to Heppenstein he asserts that he had ‘had it made’ [‘fatto fare’].

The present painting faithfully retraces the original and is very careful in the description of detail although it is a little more delicate in colouring. It only differs in lacking the signature and date which in the original are positioned on the step at lower left. Curiously, in describing the Susanna and the Elders which he wanted to give to Schönborn, Luti presented the work not as by Artemisia, but as by her father Orazio Gentileschi, and it was as such that the work is listed in the castle inventory of 1719 (see literature). Raymond Ward Bissel (Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art: critical reading and catalogue raisonné, University Park 1999 p. 10) attempted to explain this change of attribution by claiming that either Luti did not know the painter Artemisia, but only her more celebrated father, or by otherwise proposing that at the time, the signature was covered by a layer of paint. Excluding both these suggestions Maffeis (see literature) instead advanced the notion that Luti himself deliberately hid the signature on the original – which later re-emerged, probably thanks to a nineteenth century restoration – so as to pass it off as the work of Orazio Gentileschi, since the attribution of the painting to a woman artist, in addition to its subject, would probably have made it even more provocative, and therefore quite inappropriate to be received as a gift by Schönborn.