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Lot Essay
This recently discovered oil sketch by Niccolò dell' Abate is a rare surviving modello, executed during his years in France (1552-1570) when working on the decoration of the Royal Château of Fontainebleu, and constitutes an important addition to the artist's oeuvre.
Although previously thought to show Venus picking up the Apple of Discord, the subject was identified by Dominique Cordellier as Atalanta picking up the Golden Apple when the picture was included in the seminal Primaticcio exhibition, held at the Louvre in 2004 (op. cit., p. 354). The story of Atalanta, the Arcadian princess gifted with the ability to run faster than any man, is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Having sworn an oath of virginity to the goddess Diana (a statue of whom is shown to the right of the protagonist), Atalanta would only consent to marriage if any aspiring suitor could outrun her. Hippomenes fell in love with Atalanta and challenged her to a race, during which he dropped three golden apples given to him by Venus. Niccolò has depicted the pivotal moment when Atalanta, with two golden apples already in her skirt, stoops to pick up the third, enabling Hippomenes to win the race and thereby her hand in marriage.
As Cordellier and Mina Gregori have both observed, the style and technique employed in this modello is much indebted to Parmigianino, whose late Bolognese works (1527-30) Niccolò would have encountered when he went to Bologna in 1547 to decorate the Palazzo Torfanini (now Zucchini-Solomei) and, a few years later, when he was commissioned to decorate four rooms at Palazzo Poggi. The influence of the Parmese master is most evident in the elegant figure types, in particular the female heads shown in profile, but also in the free handling and use of white tracery to define the highlights of the draperies, which shares clear affinities with Parmigianino's abbozzato technique employed in a number of his panel paintings, such as the Madonna and Child in the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Whilst the delicacy and light touch is entirely characteristic of Niccolò's work, Cordellier has proposed that the composition depends on a lost drawing by Primaticcio, whose designs Niccolò is known to have followed, for example in the oil sketch depicting Pandora, formerly in the Bassi collection and sold in Milan in 1898 (ibid.)
Gregori has proposed a date of circa 1560 (op. cit.); the mid-point of the artist's years in France. With its free handling and distinctive figure types, the present work can be stylistically compared with Niccolò's pictures of The Continence of Scipio and The Rape of Proserpine (both Paris, Musée du Louvre), whilst the latter includes a kneeling nypmh in the foreground that directly repeats the pose of Atalanta.
Although previously thought to show Venus picking up the Apple of Discord, the subject was identified by Dominique Cordellier as Atalanta picking up the Golden Apple when the picture was included in the seminal Primaticcio exhibition, held at the Louvre in 2004 (op. cit., p. 354). The story of Atalanta, the Arcadian princess gifted with the ability to run faster than any man, is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Having sworn an oath of virginity to the goddess Diana (a statue of whom is shown to the right of the protagonist), Atalanta would only consent to marriage if any aspiring suitor could outrun her. Hippomenes fell in love with Atalanta and challenged her to a race, during which he dropped three golden apples given to him by Venus. Niccolò has depicted the pivotal moment when Atalanta, with two golden apples already in her skirt, stoops to pick up the third, enabling Hippomenes to win the race and thereby her hand in marriage.
As Cordellier and Mina Gregori have both observed, the style and technique employed in this modello is much indebted to Parmigianino, whose late Bolognese works (1527-30) Niccolò would have encountered when he went to Bologna in 1547 to decorate the Palazzo Torfanini (now Zucchini-Solomei) and, a few years later, when he was commissioned to decorate four rooms at Palazzo Poggi. The influence of the Parmese master is most evident in the elegant figure types, in particular the female heads shown in profile, but also in the free handling and use of white tracery to define the highlights of the draperies, which shares clear affinities with Parmigianino's abbozzato technique employed in a number of his panel paintings, such as the Madonna and Child in the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Whilst the delicacy and light touch is entirely characteristic of Niccolò's work, Cordellier has proposed that the composition depends on a lost drawing by Primaticcio, whose designs Niccolò is known to have followed, for example in the oil sketch depicting Pandora, formerly in the Bassi collection and sold in Milan in 1898 (ibid.)
Gregori has proposed a date of circa 1560 (op. cit.); the mid-point of the artist's years in France. With its free handling and distinctive figure types, the present work can be stylistically compared with Niccolò's pictures of The Continence of Scipio and The Rape of Proserpine (both Paris, Musée du Louvre), whilst the latter includes a kneeling nypmh in the foreground that directly repeats the pose of Atalanta.