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Lot Essay
This, as Zeri recognised ('di qualità stupendamente alta') and Briganti confirmed ('bellissimo frammento'), is a fragment from a picture of Venus arming Mars that was part of the celebrated sequence of mythologies and allegories painted for the Emperor Rudolf II. Among the Emperor's earliest commissions for Veronese were the set of four ceiling canvasses now in the National Gallery, London: these were followed by the Choice between Virtue and Vice and the Wisdom and Strength (both Frick Collection, New York), the Venus and Mars (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and its pendant Mercury, Herse and Aglaurus (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), and by the Venus arming Mars. The Venus arming Mars was dismembered in the nineteenth century, but the composition is known from a copy in a Florentine private collection (see Zeri, op. cit, 1959, fig. 29; and Rearick, op. cit., fig. 43) and fragments of other copies cited by Rearick in a private collection, in Rome and at Washington. Of these, that in Rome, with the figure of Mars, had previously been published as autograph by Briganti. The importance the artist attached to the picture is suggested by the calibre of the outstanding drawing for Mars' armour now at Berlin, no. KDZ 5120 (R. Cocke, Veronese's Drawings, A Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1984, pp. 130-1, no. 51), the connection of which was first recognised by Rearick. This fragment is the lower left hand corner of the picture: Cupid holds the reins of the charger. Rearick proposed a date of 1579-80, while Marini places the picture about 1580.
The collection of the Emperor Rudolf passed, after the Sack of Prague in 1648, to Queen Christina of Sweden, who took the majority of her Italian pictures with her on her abdication in 1654. The Rudolphine Veroneses were to remain together until the dispersal of the Orléans Collection a century and a half later. The histories of the picture of which this fragment formed part and the celebrated Mars and Venus in New York have understandably been confused. The elaborate armour worn by Mars in the picture of which this is a fragment may explain the belief of 1805 that it was a portrait of the Emperor Charles V: its low price then suggests that the picture may have been damaged, which would explain its subsequent dismemberment.
The collection of the Emperor Rudolf passed, after the Sack of Prague in 1648, to Queen Christina of Sweden, who took the majority of her Italian pictures with her on her abdication in 1654. The Rudolphine Veroneses were to remain together until the dispersal of the Orléans Collection a century and a half later. The histories of the picture of which this fragment formed part and the celebrated Mars and Venus in New York have understandably been confused. The elaborate armour worn by Mars in the picture of which this is a fragment may explain the belief of 1805 that it was a portrait of the Emperor Charles V: its low price then suggests that the picture may have been damaged, which would explain its subsequent dismemberment.