The Gentileschi Effect

The first mention of this work in which it already has a correct attribution to Volterrano, dates back to the beginning of the 18th century when Filippo Baldinucci, in his “Notizie dei professori del disegno” (published 1728), remembers how Volterrano “per Francesco Parrocchiani figurò in un quadro ad olio un Ila colla tazza e col vaso d’oro: e per questo di servì dell’effigie al naturale del marchese Altoviti, che allora dello stesso principe era paggio di Valigia, stimato uno de’ più leggiandari giovani, che vedesse quell’età;”. (An oil on canvas painting of Ila with the cup and golden vase was realized for Francescao Parrochiani, and on this special day he created a painting depicting a natural effigy of the Marquese Altoviti, who at the time was the Prince’s suitcase page, believed to be one of the most graceful young men of that age;) The Florentine writer continues his story praising the painting highly: “onde io diro ciò … che per eccellenza dell’opera, e per la bellezza del rappresentato, scorge, chi guarda queste pitture due maraviglie in un tempo stesso.” (so I tell of this ... because of the excellent quality of the work, because of the beauty of the subject depicted, a person looking at these paintings discovers two wonders at the same time.) After Baldinucci’s enthusiastic description no trace of this work can be found until the beginning of the present century when Marco Voena rediscovered the painting in a private collection in Rome and published it in the catalogue of an exhibition held in Florence in 2002. The catalogue was curated by Mina Gregori and the entry was written by Maria Cecilia Fabbri who, ten years later, was one of the authors of the first comprehensive monograph on Volterrano. Quite curiously Baldinucci identifies the subject as Hylas, the handsome boy who was first kidnapped by Heracles and that followed him in the Argonauts expedition; during the expedition Hylas stopped at the spring of Pegae in Mysia where the nymphs of the spring fell in love with him and lured him into the spring where he vanished [this part of the myth is represented in the famous, and now controversial painting by John William Waterhouse at the Manchester Art Gallery] (Fig. 1). Maria Cecilia Fabbri points out that the correct identification should be that of Ganymede, the beautiful youth who was kidnapped by Jupiter and brought to Mount Olympus, and that Baldinucci chose deliberately to avoid mentioning this reading of the subject since its homoerotic connotations were too obvious. According to Fabbri a more proper date for the execution of this work is around 1645/46 when Volterrano was extensively working for Don Lorenzo de’Medici, the seventh son of the Grand Duke Ferdinand I and one of the major collectors of his age, as well as being one of the principal patrons of Volterrano who decorated with frescoes the Prince’s Villa alla Petraia. Indeed further evidence of this is found in the fact that the painting was commissioned, as stated by Baldinucci by Francesco Parrocchiani, who was one of the friends of Don Lorenzo de’ Medici. This half-length portrait of a boy with a vase and a gilded cup can be linked to a series of paintings made by Volterrano at about the same time, which all share a very attractive and polished style in their depiction of ancient myths, as shown for example in the two detached frescoes in the collection of the Museo Stefano Bardini representing Hylas and Venus and Cupid, the Hylas with Carlo Orsi, and the fascinating Sleeping Cupid (fig. 2) of the Galleria Palatina of Palazzo Pitti, Florence. Volterrano’s mythological paintings can be regarded as one of the most sophisticated visual records of Florentine culture in the baroque age and amongst the most original interpretations of Furini’s artistic legacy.