Giovanni Maria Morandi

Orsolini Collection (according to a label on the reverse of the stretcher);
Private collection, Spain since the 1960s.

The following condition report is provided by Simon Folkes who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's. Support The painting is on canvas which has been relined. Although dating back before the last restoration to the paint surface, the lining remains in very good condition and is tacked to a solid wooden expandable stretcher with a single horizontal crossbar. Paint layers The paint surface has been relatively recently restored and the restorations, which are generally only visible under ultra-violet light, have been restricted just to those areas of damage where they are necessary. The condition of the paint layers however is very good with only a few more significant repairs such as the small circular loss in the tree trunk towards the upper left side and in the foreground between the bowl and the rabbits. There are some old paint losses, now filled and retouched, along a vertical line running down through the left side of Mary’s white sleeve into the blue drapery below. A number of tiny retouchings also cover abrasions and areas of thinness that are scattered across the painting with perhaps a greater concentration in the flesh colours of lower left putto, above the figure of Mary, and in the hair of the putto at the lower right corner. Varnish coating The painting is covered in a clear, un-discoloured varnish.
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This Rest on the Flight into Egypt is a major addition to the oeuvre of Giovanni Maria Morandi, datable on stylistic grounds to the peak of the artist's career in the 1680s. Morandi was born in Florence in 1622 and, according to his biographer Lione Pascoli, he trained in the studio of Giovanni Bilivert. However, he spent most of his long professional career in Rome and is therefore often considered an artist of the Roman school.  He was an almost exact contemporary of Carlo Maratta. His most important patrons in Rome were the Salviati and various members of the Chigi family, including Pope Alexander VII.

The present painting is the most significant addition to the small group of 'quadri da stanza' by the artist since the appearance in 1964 of The Three Maries at the tomb of Christ on the Roman art market. Formerly attributed to Placido Costanzi, that work was attributed to Morandi by Erich Schleier in 1970. Described by Vittorio Casale as a 'lirico capolavoro',¹ the picture is now in the Museo del Barocco Romano at Ariccia as part of Fabrizio Lemme's donation.²  Both works are surprisingly large, with The Three Maries being slightly taller (177 by 124 cm.).

The present picture was traditionally attributed to Agostino Masucci, an 18th-century follower of Maratta, but was recognized as a work of Morandi by Erich Schleier. The attribution has since been accepted by Giancarlo Sestieri, Francesco Petrucci and Edgar Peters Bowron.³  The painting is not mentioned by the sources, Pascoli and Pio. On stylistic grounds, it may be compared to other works from the 1680s: the somewhat plump physiognomy of the Christ Child and the facial type of the Virgin recur in Morandi's altarpiece, The Madonna of the Rosary, painted in 1686 for the D'Elci chapel in Santa Sabina in Rome. The same female facial type is repeated in The Marriage of the Virgin, one of the two paintings by the artist in the sacristy of Santa Maria dell' Anima, Rome (1682), while the bright tonality can also be seen in the altarpiece of The Virgin appearing to St. Philip Neri in Siena Cathedral (1680-87).

There are two other, smaller paintings of The Rest on the Flight by Morandi, both closely related to the present picture. The first is in the Pallavicini collection in Rome (72.7 by 53.1 cm.): like The Three Maries, it too was wrongly attributed to Costanzi by Voss, Longhi and Zeri and dated to 1730-40,⁴ before being recognized as a work by Morandi and listed as such by Sestieri.⁵  The second is in the collection of Nelson Shanks, Andalusia, Pennsylvania (75 by 55 cm). Both works, but especially the Pallavicini picture, demonstrate strong compositional similarities with the present work, although it is impossible to establish whether the Pallavicini picture is a modello for the present picture, or rather a variant ('riduzione in piccolo') of it. The pose of the Virgin and that of the Christ Child turned toward the viewer, for example, are virtually the same, while the figure of Joseph is given exactly the same pose as here but placed further to the right. The two putti collecting cherries on the ground are identical, although the Pallavicini version features only one flying angel. The pose of the Virgin's head and her facial type in the Pallavicini picture are almost identical to those of the same figure in the altarpiece in the D'Elci chapel in Santa Sabina. These similarities further confirm a dating for the present picture close to that of the altarpiece (1686).

In an email, dated 22 October 2009, Francesco Petrucci kindly drew attention to the fact that two pictures by Morandi depicting The Rest on the Flight were sold in London in the 18th century: one in the sale of the collection of Augustin Ménageot in 1755 ('Morandi, The Virgin, our Saviour, and St. Joseph', lot 4) and the other in the sale of Mr. Fauquier on 12 April 1758 ('Morandi, A Reposo'), which then passed into the collection of George, 3rd Earl of Cholmondeley. The two may have been one and the same picture, and it is impossible to know if one or the other may be identified with the present painting.

This catalogue entry is based upon a detailed study written by Dr. Erich Schleier, a copy of which is available on request.

1.  Vittorio Casale, 'La Collezione Lemme ad Ariccia e qualche riflessione sul Settecento romano', in Il Museo del Barocco Romano La collezione Lemme a Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia, Rome, 2007, p. XXXIV; E. Schleier, ibid., pp. 34-35, no. 18, reproduced in colour.
2.  The painting was bought by Fabrizio and Fiammetta Lemme in 1974.
3.  Emails dated 22 October 2009 and 13 October 2009 respectively.
4.  Federico Zeri, La Galleria Pallavicini in Roma, Florence, 1959, pp. 97-98, no. 153, ill. On the back of the canvas is an inscription: 'Dell' Ecc.ma Sig.a Duch.a - per legato dell' E.mo Borromei - 1740'. It thus came to the collection through the Princess Giustina Borromeo, wife of Don Camillo Rospigliosi.
5.  G. Sestieri, Repertorio della  pittura romana della fine del seicento e del settecento, Turin, 1994, I, p. 132. E. Schleier, "Disegni di Giovanni Maria Morandi nelle collezioni pubbliche tedeschi: l'album del museo di lipsia con alcune note sulla sua provenienza (di Andreas Stolzenburg)", in Studi di Storia dell'Arte, 9, 1998 (published February 1999), p. 253, reproduced fig. 35.