Alessandro Marchesini

Probably art market, Paris, first half of the 20th century;

Where acquired by a private collector, Mexico City;

Thence by descent to the present collector.

An art dealer and advisor in addition to a painter, Alessandro Marchesini spent his career between Verona, Bologna, and the Veneto. In his depiction of Diana—crowned with a crescent moon and holding a javelin—presiding over her coterie of nymphs, Marchesini imbues the scene with an airiness and chromatic radiance that looks forward to the Rococo. The stag's head hanging from the tree at right recalls Diana's transformation of the young prince Actaeon, who had accidentally stumbled upon her bathing, into a deer only to be devoured by his own hounds.