Mercury snares Birds, Cupid Hearts

細節

Marcantonio Franceschini (1648-1729)
Mercury snares Birds, Cupid Hearts
oil on canvas
34½ x 98 3/8in. (87 x 250cm.)

來源

Commissioned by Prince Johann Adam Andreas von Liechtenstein and by descent until 1824.

出版

D.C. Miller, Franceschini's Drawings for the Liechtenstein Garden Palace, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University Museum, 38, no. 2, 1979, fig. 5.
V. Callahan, Comments on the Iconography of Six Engravings by Meloni after Franceschini, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University Museum, 38, 1979, fig. 13.
D.C. Miller, Marcantonio Franceschini and the Liechtensteins, Cambridge, 1991, p. 44, 89-90, no. 22.

刻印

F.A. Meloni (inscribed 'Mercurius Volucres Loqueavit Corda Cupiod'), reproduced D. Miller, 1991, pl. 68.

拍品專文

Prince Johann Adam Andreas von Liechtenstein (1657-1712) was a patron and collector of exceptional vigour. His employment of the Bolognese Marcantonio Franceschini for the decoration of his Garden Palace at Rossaud, Vienna has been fully considered by Dwight C. Miller, most recently in his monograph of 1991. Franceschini worked for the prince intermittently between 1691 and 1708 and this relationship is comprehensively documented in the Lichtenstein archives (Miller, op. cit., 1991, pp. 182-282). The project for the Garden Palace was by any standard ambitious, Franceschini receiving a commission for a total of twenty-six canvases for rooms dedicated to the Goddesses Diana and Venus at a sum of 6,600 ducati and a further 100 ongari in gold, 16 January 1693: the prince specified that all the pictures were to be completed by Franceschini himself. Subsequently further canvases were ordered for the Long Gallery and for further rooms off this. The present picture is one of fourteen from the room dedicated to Venus which opened off the Long Gallery: it was originally a soprafinestra above one of two windows overlooking the garden itself. A preparatory drawing is in the Princeton University Art Museum, no. 76-61b (fig. a).