This bozzetto, or oil sketch, for an as-yet undiscovered painting was executed circa 1785 by Gaetano Gandolfi, the last great painter of the Bolognese Baroque tradition. Together with Gaetano’s brother, Ubaldo, and son, Mauro, the prolific Gandolfi were the dominant artistic force in northern Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century.

According to David Ekserdjian, this work was inspired by a now-lost painting by Agostino Carracci (known through several reproductive prints, including fig. 1).¹ And, indeed, the bozzetto exemplifies the combination of influences that defined Gaetano’s artistic output. A painter, sculptor, draughtsman, and etcher, Gaetano’s work is best understood as the culmination of the three-century-long Bolognese figural tradition that traces its origins to Ludovico Carracci. Yet the work’s masterful brushwork, loose contours, and multihued palette also point to the influence of Venice, where Gaetano studied in 1760.

The oil sketch illustrates a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses (10.58-59): the moment Orpheus, who has thrown aside his lyre, attempts to pull Eurydice free from the flames of Hades. The vitality of the small composition derives from the figures’ arrested movements, evident in the powerful dynamism of Orpheus’s nude form, and the freedom of the brushwork, especially apparent in Eurydice’s frothy drapery. The snake in the foreground harkens back to Eurydice's death, when she trod on an asp while attempting to flee from an unwelcome suitor. Heartbroken by his loss, Orpheus descends into the underworld and using the power of his musical abilities, convinces Pluto to allow Eurydice to return to the land of the living, on the condition that Orpheus not look back at her until they reach the light of day. While here they look in opposite directions, in Ovid, Orpheus ultimately succumbs, losing Eurydice to the land of the shades for a second time.

The composition exists in two other autograph versions: one known only through a black and white photograph at the Witt Library, London, formerly in the collection of the King of Romania (when it was erroneously attributed to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo), and one, in reverse, at the Musée de Tessé, Le Mans (inv. no. 10.128), of lesser quality than the present painting. The survival of such bozzetti speaks to the longstanding appetite on the part of collectors for such oil sketches, which, virtually from their inception, were considered works of art in their own right as well as serving a practical function to aid in preparing larger works.

We are grateful to Professor Daniele Benati for endorsing the attribution on the basis of digital photographs.

¹ Cited in Moatti 1992, unpaginated, under cat. no. 12.