Fabrizio Chiari © (1615 ca, 1695)
Triumph of Venus, 17th Century
the much more famous one, Homage to Venus.
Titian painted it for the Alabaster Chambers of Alfonso d'Este, Lord of Ferrara. He had created a sort of marvelous studio in the Ducal Palace of his city, to decorate which he invited some of the greatest Italian painters active at the time, that is, at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
And among these, Titian obviously stood out for his incomparable fame and intrinsic greatness. The "Homage to Venus" was a resounding success, so much so that it became one of the most beloved paintings by the artists themselves and by art critics, so much so that it was copied by many of Europe's most illustrious painters between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Rubens, Reni, and Poussin!
Our copy, examined here, likely dates to the same historical period, in the midst of the "Neo-Venetian" phase, as Roberto Longhi calls it in his studies of the Este court and its enormous influence. Therefore, our copy could date about a hundred years or so after Titian's original, executed around 1520, and relate to the Roman environment that fostered a true cult of the magnificence of Venetian art when, in the Eternal City, the great painter and architect Pietro da Cortona dominated. Although Tuscan, he was a devoted follower of the sixteenth-century Venetian masters. Among the many students and collaborators of Cortona who dedicated themselves with particular dedication to fostering this fascinating Venetian style in Rome with their works , I believe it is possible to identify the author of our copy.
Considering the pictorial material of our copy and the excellent quality of the drawing, and what we might call a true reinterpretation of Titian's style, I believe the painting under examination here was executed by a very specific follower of Cortona. This is the Roman master Fabrizio Chiari (c. 1615-1695), a highly praised artist of his time, a learned classicist and a devotee of Venetian taste, as seen in one of his masterpieces, the immense and beautiful fresco depicting the Reconciliation of Jacob and Esau in the so-called Gallery of Alexander VII at the Quirinale, painted in the 1650s.
I seem to recognize here the same hand that created the magnificent copy under examination here, with its marked naturalistic taste, the finest quality of the pictorial material and the drawing, typically seventeenth-century. A painting, in short, of considerable historical and artistic interest and of excellent quality.
Sincerely, Claudio Strinati "
The work is accompanied by a study on the pigments carried out by Professor Paolo Romano of the Nuclear Physics Department of the University of Catania, which certifies the nature of the pigments.