Lot 79

THE PROPERTY OF MEMBERS OF THE VON DER SCHULENBURG FAMILY The following three lots were acquired, in at least two cases direct from the artists, by Field Marshal Count Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg (1661-1747) and have passed by descent from his nephew to the present owners. Schulenburg was, with Consul Smith, the greatest foreign patron of painters and collector of pictures resident in Venice in the eighteenth century. A professional soldier of Saxon origin who had fought in most of the great European wars of his time, Schulenburg's defence of Corfu against the Turks in 1715 and 1716 had made him a hero to the Venetians, who erected a statue in his honour and granted him a life pension. He decided to retire to Venice and established himself at Palazzo Loredan near San Trovaso. There, in 1724, at the age of sixty-three, he found himself in possession of a group of eighty-eight paintings, mainly from the collections of the Dukes of Mantua, which were ceded to him by a dealer named Giovanni Battista Rota who had defaulted on a loan. This awakened in the Marshal a voracious appetite for collecting and in the remaining two decades of his life he amassed over nine hundred and fifty pictures. Ably assisted by his advisors, first Pittoni and then Piazzetta, Schulenburg acquired works by almost all the leading Venetian painters of his day. His purchases accelerated in the 1730s and in 1735 he began to send regular shipments of paintings back to his estates in Germany. A bachelor, he bequeathed the whole of his vast collection to his nephew with the request that it be preserved intact, but about 150 pictures, including many of the finest, were dispersed at Christie's as early as 1775 (12-13 April). Those included one of Canaletto's greatest masterpieces, The Riva degli Schiavoni, looking West from S. Biagio, now in Sir John Soane's Museum, London, Marieschi's Rialto Bridge from the North with the Arrival of the Patriarch Francesco Antonio Correr in the collection of the National Trust at Osterley Park, and his Courtyard of the Doge's Palace sold in these Rooms on 13 December 1996, Piazzetta's paintings in Cologne and Chicago and exceptional works by Ceruti, Pittoni, Ricci and Carlevarijs. More paintings have been sold in London auctions since 1982. Schulenburg's activities as a patron and collector are, however, particularly well documented by papers and inventories now in the Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv at Hannover and the collection can to a large extent be reconstructed (see, above all, A. Binion, La Galleria scomparsa del maresciallo von der Schulenburg, Milan, 1990; for shorter analyses, see A. Binion, From Schulenburg's Gallery and Records, The Burlington Magazine, CXII, no. 806, May 1970, pp. 297-303, and F. Haskell, Patrons and Painters. Art and Society in Baroque Italy, New Haven and London, 1980, pp. 310-15).

Vittore Ghislandi, called Fra' Galgario (1655-1743)

A Youth, bust-length, in a brown coat and cap

Details

Vittore Ghislandi, called Fra' Galgario (1655-1743)
A Youth, bust-length, in a brown coat and cap
with inventory numbers 337 (white) and 186 (red); with the inscription on a label on the reverse: 'P Paulotto'
oil on canvas
20 3/8 x 17in. (51.8 x 43.3cm.)

Provenance

Field Marshal Count Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg (1661-1747), by whom shipped to Germany in December 1737 (see Binion, op. cit., 1990, p. 265).
Bequeathed to his nephew Christian Günther von der Schulenburg, Berlin, and by descent to the present owner.

Literature

Inventario Generale della Galleria di S: Eccellza Felt Marescial Conte di Sculembourgh..., 30 May 1738, as 'Paulotto' (see Binion, op. cit., 1990, p. 208).
Inventario Generale della Galleria di S. E. Maresciallo Co: di Schulemburg..., Venice, 30 June 1741, as 'Pad. Pauoloto' (see Binion, op. cit., 1990, p.235).
Inventaire de la Gallerie de Feu S. e. Mgr. le Feldmarechal Comte de Schulenburg - Tableaux de f.c. à Berlin, c. 1750, no. 337 (see Binion, op. cit., 1990, p.283).
A. Binion, From Schulenburg's Gallery and Records, The Burlington Magazine, CXII, no. 806, May 1970, p. 298.
A. Binion, La Galleria scomparsa del maresciallo von der Schulenburg, Milan, 1990, pp. 208, 235, 265 and 283.

Lot Essay

Schulenburg owned eleven pictures by the artist, who is described in his inventories as 'Padre Paulotto' on account of the thirteen years (1675-1688) he spent as a lay brother in the monastery of San Francesco di Paola in Venice. It was there that he took the name 'Fra Vittore' by which he is sometimes known. After his definitive return to Bergamo, sometime after 1702, he entered the monastery of Galgario, from which he gained his best known sobriquet.

Pace Maria Cristina Gozzoli (Vittore Ghislandi detto Fra' Galgario in I Pittori Bergamaschi dal XIII al XIX Secolo : Il Settecento I, Bergamo, 1982, p. 8) and Ugo Ruggeri (in The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, 12, p. 559), both of whom state that only one of Schulenburg's paintings by Fra Galgario survives, five others were sold at Sotheby's in the 1980s: 23 June 1982, lot 72; 4 April 1984, lot 110 (Binion, op. cit., 1990, pl. 18; subsequently sold at Finarte, Milan, 24 October 1989, lot 102); 12 December 1984, lot 161; 10 December 1986, lot 117 (Binion, op. cit., 1970, fig. 30); and 9 December 1987, lot 22.

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