Alexander and Roxanne

A leading artist in Venice by the 1740s, Francesco Fontebasso trained with Sebastiano Ricci but also took inspiration from Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, especially in terms of his vibrant palette and elegant compositions. An accomplished decorator of churches and palaces, in 1761 Fontebasso visited Saint Petersburg where he produced ceiling paintings and decorations for the Winter Palace, though lamentably, these were subsequently destroyed.

Marina Magrini in her 1988 catalogue raisonné of the artist (loc. cit.) identifies the subject of the present canvas as the meeting or marriage of Alexander the Great and Roxana, the daughter of a Bactrian nobleman in the Asian territories conquered by Alexander. According to legend, Alexander fell in love with Roxana at first sight. Given the exotic costumes worn by the figures, other identifications of the subject could include Dido and Aeneas and Mark Antony and Cleopatra; the weeping woman at the right of the composition might allude to the tragic fate of any of the three of those unions. Although Magrini suggested that the present picture might be a fragment of a larger work, this is unlikely as this type of abbreviated, close-up composition was popular in Venice during Fontebasso’s era.

There is a Fontebasso drawing in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, cited by Magrini (op. cit.), which is a design for a painting depicting Antiochus and Stratonice whose figures are in similar costumes and poses (in reverse) to those depicted here.