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Susanna and the Elders and Sophonisba receiving a cup of poison

(1675 to 1741 Italy)

Colnaghi

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Oil on canvas, unlined, a pair

Both 49 ½ x 42 ½ in. (125.5 x 108 cm.)

Provenance: Private collection, France, since the end of the 19th century; and thence by descent.

This beautifully painted pair of pictures by the famous Venetian eighteenth-century master, Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, portrays the stories of two women, Susanna and Sophonisba, who, since the Renaissance, had been regarded as paradigms of female virtue and had long been popular as subjects for artists.

The story of Susanna and the Elders, considered apocryphal by Protestants, but included in the Book of Daniel (as chapter 13) by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, tells how Susanna, a beautiful Hebrew wife, was falsely accused by two elderly and lecherous voyeurs. As she bathed in her garden, having sent away her attendants, she was secretly observed by two lustful elders, who accosted her as she made her way back to her house, threatening to claim that she was meeting a young man in the garden. Refusing to be blackmailed, she was arrested and was about to be put to death for adultery, when the young Daniel interrupted the proceedings, exclaiming that he did not want to be responsible for the death of an innocent woman. The two elders were then questioned separately about what they had seen, and disagreed under cross-examination about the tree under which Susanna supposedly met her lover, one saying they had met under a mastic and the other under an evergreen oak tree. The great difference in size between the two trees made the Elders' lie plain to all the observers, Susanna’s false accusers were put to death and virtue triumphed. From around 1500 onwards the story of Susanna was a popular subject in painting, partly because of the possibilities offered for the prominent treatment of the female nude. Pellegrini’s handling of the subject, as seen in the Colnaghi picture, emphasizes the drama of the confrontation between Susanna and her accusers and accentuates the beauty of the female nude by contrast with the ugliness of the elderly male voyeurs.

If the story of Susanna represents the triumph of female virtue over male injustice, that of Sophonisba epitomizes tragic female heroism. According to Livy (Roman History, XXX, 15), Sophonisba, daughter of the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal, was captured and married by the Numidian king Masinissa during the Punic Wars (c. 205 B.C.) When the Roman general Scipio Africanus refused to agree to this arrangement, insisting on the immediate surrender of the princess so that she could be taken to Rome and appear in the triumphal parade, Masinissa, who feared the Romans more than he loved Sophonisba, told her that he could not free her from captivity or shield her from Roman wrath, and asked her to die like a true Carthaginian princess. With great composure, she drank a cup of poison that he offered her, rather than suffering the degradations and humiliations of being led in a triumphal parade through Rome. The story of Sophonisba, like that of the heroine Susanna, was popular throughout the Baroque period as an example of feminine virtue, both subjects also providing legitimate pretexts for the presentation of erotically appealing images of beautiful women.
Pellegrini was one of the most successful and important Venetian decorative painters of the earlier eighteenth-century. During his long peripatetic career largely spent outside Venice, Pellegrini was much in demand with patrons in northern Europe, and he worked extensively for aristocratic patrons in England, also achieving notable successes in France, Holland and at the German and Austrian princely and imperial courts. His style, epitomised by its soft, sensuous brushwork and delicate colouring, harked back to Veronese and the great Venetian sixteeenth-century masters. Fusing the Renaissance style of Paolo Veronese with the Baroque of Pietro de Cortona and Luca Giordano, Pellegrini’s pictures ushered in the rococo and paved the way for the achievements of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo as well as that of other Venetian masters such as Jacopo Amigoni, the last distinguished exponent of Venetian decorative painting in England.

Born in Venice, Pellegrini trained in the studio of Paolo Pagani with whom he travelled to Moravia and Vienna in 1690. The young artist remained and worked for six years in Austria (1690-1696). Returning to Venice and probably visiting Rome, Pellegrini became familiar with the colourful, fluid decorative styles of Sebastiano Ricci and Giovanni Battista Gaulli. In 1701, he married Angela, the sister of the celebrated Venetian Grand Tour pastel portraitist Rosalba Carriera, who was later to enjoy great success in Paris. After an early period working in Venice, Pellegrini moved to England in 1708 and, from 1713 worked peripatetically in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, where he won fame and amassed a considerable fortune, before returning to Venice in 1735, where he remained for the rest of his life.

The Colnaghi paintings can be dated to artist’s first period in England, between 1708 and 1713. After completing several important religious commissions in Venice, Pellegrini left for England in the winter of 1708 together with his wife Angela and fellow Venetian artist Marco Ricci. They had been invited by the opera-loving Charles Montagu, the British Ambassador to Venice and later first Duke of Manchester and, through his introduction, both artists were employed painting scenery for the Queen’s Theatre Haymarket, which at that time was the centre of Italian opera in London, as well collaborating on an important decorative commission at Castle Howard in 1709, which was unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1940. Pellegrini was later to work for the Duke of Manchester decorating the staircase of the Duke’s country house, Kimbolton Castle, his only surviving major English commission, as well as providing major decorative schemes for some of the great London town houses, notably Burlington House, Manchester House in Arlington Street and Portland House in St James’s Square.

Pellegrini and Marco Ricci’s arrival in England ushered in a brief, but glorious, flowering of Venetian decorative painting which lasted until the early 1730s, when the taste for the Venetian barochetto finally succumbed to the cold winds of Palladianism, although this taste was already on the wane by 1719, the date of Pellegrini’s second visit to England. Pellegrini’s successful entry into England’s artistic circles was confirmed in 1711, when he became a founder-member and director of the country’s first school for art, Godfrey Kneller’s Academy in Great Queen Street, whose members also included the architect James Gibbs and the impresario Owen McSwiny, manager of the Haymarket Theatre. Pellegrini was also Wren’s favoured candidate for the decoration of the dome of St Paul’s Cathederal, though for nationalistic and religious reasons, the commission was ultimately given to the Protestant Englishman Sir James Thornhill.

Stylistically the Colnaghi paintings can be connected with other works from Pellegrini’s first British period such as the Rebecca at the Well in the National Gallery London (NG 6332), with which there are also strong compositional similarities. But the closest parallel is with a series of paintings now at Narford Hall in Norfolk, which were given by Lord Burlington to Sir Andrew Fountaine in 1719 and almost certainly commissioned around 1709 for the Saloon at Burlington House, by Lord Burlington’s mother, Juliana Countess of Burlington. The Colnaghi Susanna and the Elders is very similar in composition to the Narford Susannah although in the drama of the encounter is made more emphatic in the Colnaghi version through the pointing finger and the open hand gesture of the two elders, suggesting that the Colnaghi painting is a slightly later reworking of the subject.


The Pellegrini paintings for the Saloon at Burlington House now at Narford, on some of which he collaborated with Marco Ricci, comprised six large paintings illustrating scenes from Ovid and three overdoors: Susannah and the Elders, which was originally hung over the east door, with its pendant of Angelica and Medoro over the opposite door and a painting of Tarquin and Lucretia placed in the middle over the larger north door. The subjects of the overdoors, drawn respectively from the Bible, Ariosto and Roman history, commemorated famous and virtuous women, an appropriate choice of subject for the Countess Burlington. At that time Burlington House was the centre of a glittering cultural nexus which drew together poets, musicians, painters and architects. It was there that Handel composed many of his Italian operas, and the poets John Gay and Alexander Pope were frequent visitors. The remodelling of the architecture was carried out by James Gibbs and the decorative painting was executed by Pellegrini and Marco Ricci in the Saloon, as well as by Pellegrini’s great Venetian contemporary and rival Sebastiano Ricci (Marco’s uncle), who arrived in England in 1712 and painted the large and slightly later canvasses still in situ either side of the staircase at Burlington House which were commissioned 1712-15. The Pellegrini/Marco Ricci canvasses now at Narford represent, according to George Knox, ‘a perfect and happy monument to the warm and pagan civilisation of Italy then overwhelming London in the form of Italian opera, and a wonderful visualisation of that enthusiasm for the poetry of antiquity which so preoccupied the poets of the Augustan age.’ In their original setting they must have dazzled London society and it is likely that the Colnaghi paintings were among the ‘abundance of large Eysel pictures’ (few of which have survived) which the diarist George Vertue recorded were painted by Pellegrini ‘for many noblemen and curious Gentlemen’, many of whom would undoubtedly have visited and admired his paintings at Burlington House and commissioned versions of the paintings that they had seen there. Such, indeed was the enthusiasm that the Venetian decorations inspired at Burlington House, that one contemporary visitor, Richard Graham wrote in 1716: ‘I congratulate my countrymen upon the happy prospect that they have of saving themsleves the trouble and expense of a journey to Rome, or Paris, for the study of those arts, which they can find in their utmost perfection at Burlington House.’

In February 1713 Pellegrini left England for Holland and then spent the next six years working in Bensberg, Antwerp, the Hague and Paris. In the meantime the young Lord Burlington had reached his majority and Colen Campbell was employed to redo the interiors of Burlington House in a more austerely architectural version of the Palladian style. Burlington favoured Sebastiano Ricci’s more Roman version of the Venetian baroque over the painterly qualities of Pellegrini, and in 1719 the series of canvasses painted by Pellegrini for the Saloon were given away to Lord Burlington’s friend Sir Andrew Fountaine who installed them at Narford Hall. In 1719 Pellegrini returned to England and it is likely that at that time he supervised their installation as well as painting some further canvasses were commissioned by Sir Andrew. These probably included the Narford Sophonisba, which contains elements also seen in the Colnaghi painting, such as the figure of the page boy. However, in this case it is likely that the Colnaghi version, which is in Pellegrini’s softer earlier manner, predates that at Narford, which, as Knox notes is painted in a harder style than the earlier canvasses, and may have been executed, according to Knox, by another artist such as Vincenzo Damini perhaps working under Pellegrini’s direction. In a 1795 Guidebook to Narford, the Sophonisba was recorded as hanging over the north door of the Hall next to a painting of the Death of Lucretia, while the Susannah was hung adjacent to the Angelica and Medoro, the painting which was originally hung as an overdoor on the opposite side of the Burlington House Saloon. A full length version of Sophonisba, formerly with Colnaghi and possibly dating from Pellegrini’s first period in England, is in the Toledo Museum of Art.

Pellegrini was to return to these subjects later on his career. In 1722 he painted a version of the Susannah and the Elders which contains many of the elements of the Colnaghi painting, but is a horizontal format, as part of a series of overdoors commissioned by Johann Philipp Franz von Schőnborn for the Empress’s Audience Chamber of the Wurzburg Residenz. Two years later, in 1724, Pellegrini painted a version of Sophonisba for another member of the family, Lothar Franz von Schőnborn at Schloss Weissenstein, Pommersfelden. Both these later pictures are essentially reworkings of pictorial ideas which were probably first explored by Pellegrini in the seminal canvasses painted for the Countess of Burlington and now at Narford, and then evolved in the present pair of paintings now with Colnaghi. Given the paucity of surviving works from Pellegrini’s first English period, the Colnaghi pictures are attractive and important examples of a seminal phase in the artist’s career.