拍品专文
This playful, sophisticated painting reprises the composition of the artist’s own monumental Meeting of Alexander the Great and Roxana, unobscured by the trompe l’oeil curtain, now in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (fig. 1). The painting depicts an episode from the life of Alexander the Great, during a siege of a fortress in Bactria. In an attempt to garner support from the Persian aristocracy, Alexander resolves to marry Roxana, the recently captured daughter of a local nobleman.
First recorded in the collection of the Dresden Royal Picture Gallery in an inventory of 1754, the present work can thus be dated to his short stay in the city (c.1753-55) during which he worked under the patronage of King Frederick Augustus II, Elector of Saxony. It follows that the Hermitage painting was also painted before Rotari departed for Russia in 1756, following an invitation from Empress Elizabeth II to whom he would serve as court painter until his death in 1762. The present work was sold from the Dresden collection in 1860; it then disappeared from public view until its exhibition in Indianapolis in 1987.
Classical antiquity offers an important source for the motif of the trompe l’oeil curtain in the form of a canonical anecdote that has seized the imaginations of artists for centuries. In his Historia naturalis, Pliny the Elder recounts the story of a competition between the artists Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes so skilfully that birds flew down to peck at the painting, believing the grapes to be real. The artist found himself defeated however, when he asked Parrhasius to draw back the curtain covering his own painting, only to realise that the curtain was, in fact, painted itself.
The later practice of hanging curtains in front of paintings brought a new context to the legend; the action of drawing them across adding a sense of drama and revelation. Discussed at length in the most notable treatises on painting, the device flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (fig. 2). Numerous artists across Europe riffed on the motif to showcase their skills, using fictive curtains to frame their composition or to partly obscure the scene beyond (as in the present work), or by depicting a painting within the scene that is itself covered by a curtain. Rotari here employs the fictive device to great effect, elevating its role beyond a witty complement to the scene behind. The curtain itself becomes subject matter, inviting the viewer to marvel at its verisimilitude, rich textures and subtle translucence, whilst imbuing the painting with a playful, theatrical dynamic.