Lot 564: A SET OF FOUR SOUTH ITALIAN MYTHOLOGICAL REVERSE-GLASS PAINTINGS

A SET OF FOUR SOUTH ITALIAN MYTHOLOGICAL REVERSE-GLASS PAINTINGS
BY CARLO GAROFALO, NAPLES, CIRCA 1692-1705
Depicting 'Venus and Cupid', 'Diana bathing', 'The Triumph of Galatea' and 'Pan and Syrinx', the last panel signed 'Dn. C.us Garofalus Pictor Regis', each within a rectangular moulded tortoiseshell and ebony frame, minor losses to the panels depicting 'The Triumph of Galatea' and 'Diana bathing'
25½ in. (65 cm.) high; 33½ in. (85 cm.) wide [without frames]
32¼ in. (82 cm.) high; 40 in. (102 cm.) wide [with frames]. (4)

COMPARABLE LITERATURE:
E. Colle, Il mobile barocco in Italia, Milan, 2000, p. 66.
Alvar Gonzáles-Palacios, Il Tempio del Gusto: Roma e il Regno delle Due Sicilie, Milan, 1984, vol. I, pp. 43, 230-232 and vol. II, ill. 407, 408, p. 180.
L. Martino, 'Vetri dipinti', in Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, Naples, 1984, pp. 422 and 426.
M. Chiarini, Artisti alla corte granducale, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1969, p. 59, ills. 86-87.

Sotheby's, London, 10 June 1999, lot 62.

THE PROPERTY OF A LADY
No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.
This magnificent set of paintings on glass must be one of the most important sets of such paintings remaining in private hands. These four panels furthermore certainly count among the largest related surviving late 17th century paintings.

Reverse paintings on glass were more typically of much smaller scale and often executed to decorate elaborate cabinets or caskets. The intricate and fragile works were highly appreciated by the Italian aristocracy of the late 17th and early 18th century. The Grand Duke Ferdinand of Medici is recorded as having valued them so much that, in 1702, he hung a group of such paintings - painted by Luco Giordano and originally conceived for a jewel casket - as part of his celebrated collection (see M. Chiarini, op. cit.).

The art of painting on glass with mythological, allegorical or biblical subjects - either to be framed on their own or mounted in cabinets - is often associated with the name of the Neapolitan painter Luca Giordano (1634-1705) and at least one of these four magnificent paintings here - namely that depicting 'The Triumph of Galatea'- is directly based on Giordano's celebrated painting of this subject which today hangs in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

Giordano, court painter of Charles II, King of Spain, certainly refined the technique of reverse painting on glass and he passed it on to several pupils. It is however likely that this local tradition of painting on glass started much earlier in the 17th century. The 1685 inventories of the Alcázar of Madrid lists paintings on glass by Giordano, of which very few have survived. Two of these, signed and dated 1688, are now at La Granja de Sant' Ildefonso, while another panel signed 'Jordanus Fecit' is in the Guido Donatone Collection, Naples. Furthermore, in the surviving first and second volume of the inventories of the collections of Charles II, Giordano himself records several vidrios or pinturas sobre vidrio, although there is no evidence that any of these were executed by Giordano rather than by one of his pupils.

Relatively little is known about Carlo Garofalo (active in Spain from 1692, d. Naples 1705), a specialist in cristalli or glass paintings, who followed Giordano to Spain in 1692, where they both became Court painters to Charles II. The name 'Garofano' is mentioned several times in the 1767 inventories of the possessions of the Neapolitan Francesco Emanuele Pinto, Principe d' Ischitella: "Due quadri di palmi 3 e 3 con cornici nere e cinque stragalli indorati con figure e fiori sopra cristallo, in uno la cena del Signore colla Maddalena e nell' altro le Nozze di Cana..." (see L. Martino, op. cit.). Only very few examples of Neapolitan paintings dating from the late 17th Century and executed in this technique have survived. Apart from the painting depicting 'Pan and Syrinx' offered here, only two other examples are known to have been signed by Carlo Garofalo. The fact that Garofalo signs this picture with 'Pictor Regis' suggests an execution for this group of paintings before 1700, when King Charles II was still alive.

Although only one of the four paintings is signed, there can be no doubt, based on the stylistic affinities that the other three were painted by the same hand. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that these four paintings are of identical scale to the related pair signed by Garofalo and studied by A.Gonzáles-Palacios (op. cit.), and it is therefore not inconceivable that the six paintings were commissioned at the same time.