“Et intrecci gentili”. Per la fortuna dei dipinti imperiali di Paolo Veronese nella pittura del XVII secolo

This research is about Paolo Veronese’s paintings kept in the Prague castle at Hradčany until 1648, when the Swedish troops led by commander Christoffer von Königsmark sacked the fortress, amassing a staggering 764 pictures booty. Among them, several works followed Queen Christina of Sweden from Stockholm to Rome in 1659; afterwards, they were sold to the Duke d’Orléans in 1721, and from Paris they scattered across in England in the late XVIII century. Almost all of Caliari’s paintings possessed by Hapsburg emperors are today traceable. The recognizable ones are four Allegories of Love at the National Gallery of London; Mercury, Herse and Aglauros in the Fitzwilliam Museum of Cambridge; Wisdom and Strength and The choice between Virtue and Vice in the Frick Collection of New York; Mars and Venus united by Love in the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York; and Venus and Adonis in the Nationalmuseum of Stockholm. As far as one of the lost paintings concerns, it represented Venus arming Mars; it was probably dismembered during the XIX century; we know its original appearance from XVIII century engravings and copies now belonging to American and European collections. Two left parts of the picture are left: one, representing a Cupid, used to belong to a private collection in London, where it was seen by Federico Zeri, who praised its astonishing quality; then, in 1966 the fragment passed to the Giovanni Magnavacca collection’s in Pontremoli. The other part represents Mars, the main male figure of the painting; Giuliano Briganti saw it in 1960, one year after Zeri’s report, and recognized it as another portion of the imperial dismembered painting. Recently another picture has reached the ten canvases group: it is a small Rape of Europe, included by Nicholas Penny among Paolo Veronese’s works in the last National Gallery of London’s catalogue, dedicated to the second half of XVI century painting in Venice (2008). This painting was believed to be realized by a XIX century workshop. The research consists of three chapters: the first reconstructs the route of every painting until its final conservation places; every change of property since 1648 is mentioned, as well as the inventories where they are nominated. The second chapter compares the large number of iconographic versions of the paintings’ subject-matter given by scholars thorough the years, since they were in the Orléans collection; at the end of this section, a personal interpretation of the four London’s Allegories of Love themes is provided. The third chapter is about the influence exerted by the imperial Veronese pictures on the XVII century Flemish and Venetian paintings; finally, the role played by the Paduan painter Pietro Liberi is highlighted, in that the artist spread the Cinquecento master iconographies in Venice during the baroque age.