Giuseppe Cesari, called Il Cavalier d'Arpino

Failla Lemme

H. Röttgen, Il Cavalier Giuseppe Cesari D'Arpino, Rome 2002, pp. 113, 346-7, under no. 109,  p. 423, no. 184 reproduced

Stuck at the upper and lower edge to the wooden board although detached in many places. The board appears to be only glued at top, bottom and part of left edge to the wooden support. Several losses, particularly at the corners and top right and left edges. It appears to be made up at the upper left corner and in part along the margins. A few smaller losses, also to the pigment. The join in the middle is partly visible in the central section. Traces of water stains at the bottom and the upper left edge. It appears rubbed in places and has a slight scratch along the shoulder of the Nymphs near Acteaon. Some surface dirt. Overall colours are still fresh and retain their original tones. They are richer and less pale than they appear in the catalogue illustration. Paper slightly undulating along the whole surface. Sold in a very good early 17th Century punched and gilded Bolognese frame.
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The subject of Diana and Actaeon was represented by Arpino three times and is also known from further copies. The first autograph version (oil on panel), formerly in the Jabach collection and now in the Louvre, is dated by Röttgen to 1602-3, the period of Arpino's work on Villa Aldobrandini, Frascati.¹  Röttgen stresses the similarities between Arpino's composition and Primaticcio's decoration in the Apartement des Bains at Fontainebleau, destroyed in 1697, and in particular a composition known from a surviving drawing in the Louvre: Diana bathing with her nymphs.²  Arpino may have seen the decoration whilst he was part of the entourage of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini during a diplomatic trip to France in 1600-1, suggesting a terminus post quem for the painting.  The second version, signed by Arpino and executed on copper, is now in the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest.  Dated by Röttgen a few years later, to 1603-6, the painting is virtually identical to that of the Louvre, with only minor differences.³ 

The present guazzo on paper reverses the composition of the two previous versions.  Röttgen stresses the high quality of this work. Although it is executed in a rare medium for Arpino, other drawings with touches of gouache are known by the artist⁴ and works in gouache by contemporary painters in Rome, such as Allegrini, were popular at the time.  On stylistic grounds Röttgen believes the gouache to be a late work, dating from circa 1620. 

It has been suggested that the use of a cartoon, now lost, could explain the existence of the three verions, all of a similar size and with only minor differences in the compositions.  A cartoon would also have made it much easier to reverse the original composition.  The brother of Giuseppe Cesari, Bernardino, painted a copy of this same composition which he signs: Bernardinus Caesar ab examplo Josephi fratris Arpinas, which was in the collection of Scipione Borghese from 1613 and is now in the Galleria Borghese, Rome. 

The subject of the gouache, from Ovid's Metamorphoses, illustrates the moment when Actaeon, a famous huntsman, saw Diana and her attendants bathing near Gargaphia, for which he was changed into a stag and subsequently devoured by his own hounds.

1. See H. Röttgen, op. cit., p. 110, fig. 59, and p. 346, no. 109, illustrated
2. Inv. no. 8521; see Primatice, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2004-5, p. 194, no. 71, illustrated p. 196
3. Röttgen, op. cit., p. 111, fig. 60, and p. 347, no. 110, illustrated
4. See, for example, sale, London, Sotheby's, 3 July 1989, lot 76