MASP

Carlo Saraceni

Mars and Venus with a Circle of Cupids and Landscape, 1605-10

  • Author:
    Carlo Saraceni
  • Bio:
    Veneza, Itália, 1579-Veneza, Itália ,1620
  • Title:
    Mars and Venus with a Circle of Cupids and Landscape
  • Date:
    1605-10
  • Medium:
    Óleo sobre cobre
  • Dimensions:
    39,5 x 52 x 0,5 cm
  • Credit line:
    Doação Moinho Santista S.A., 1947
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00028
  • Photography credits:
    João Musa

TEXTS



Born in Venice, Carlo Saraceni moved to Rome at age 19, studying under renowned painter Camillo Mariani (1556-1611). The works he produced in Rome up until 1610 reflect the influence of different Venetian painters such as Titian (1488/90-1576) and Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594), but the legacy of German painter Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) comes closest to his work as a youth. Both created complex, asymmetrical, inclined compositions, with defined diagonals and a wide variety in the range of characters and background scenes, as seen in the painting in the MASP collection, Mars and Venus, with a Circle of Cupids and Landscape (1605-10). Saraceni garnered renown in Rome as a painter of small-format works on copper. In the painting owned by MASP, Mars, the god of war, is portrayed as disarmed, in an intimate scene with Venus, surrounded by cupids, who use Mars’s armor as a plaything. The dancing cupids confer movement to the painting, softening the painting’s angles and slopes and adding a dreamlike element to the composition, in opposition to the symbols of war associated with Mars. The characters stand out in the foreground, theatrically separated from the landscape backdrop, alluding to the Renaissance masters who influenced the artist. For its part, a strong interplay of light and shadow demonstrates the impact that Caravaggio (1571-1610) had on Saraceni.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017





This small copper corresponds in its measurements, as well as technically and thematically, to those of the Naples’ Galleria Nazionale, previously attributed to Adam Elsheimer, which Hermann Voss and Roberto Longhi (1917) restored to Saraceni. The Masp work – Mars and Venus, with a Circle of Cupids and Landscape – may have been part of the same series of six works and was separated from them during interventions in the Naples Royal Collections in the late 18th century. The attribution to Saraceni was rst proposed by Longhi in a letter to P. M. Bardi, June 20, 1947, which we shall just transcribe almost in its entirety: “Your picture ... interests me in particular because it is the work of a master whom I have studied at length, Carlo Saraceni; and, moreover, it is from a phase that I discovered some thirty-five years ago, when it was still confused with a work by the great German landscapist Adam Elsheimer. Giving back his mythological miniatures at the Naples Gallery to Saraceni restored the rightful name, as with many other paintings attributed to Elsheimer. The same is true for this radiant picture in which the young Saraceni, later to move even closer to the sphere of Caravaggio, still shows a close communion of spirit, not only with Elsheimer, but also with other Nordic ‘petits maîtres’ such as Lastman and Pynas, who, in the rst decade of the 1600s created, in Rome, those small, brilliant mythological fables; the blending of Nordic painters and southerners was to be of great weight in the cultural formation of even the very young Rembrandt. This painting has a place among the most interesting works of that group, in part due to its exceptional conservation. The ‘still life’ of the weapons in the foreground and the luminant view of the Roman countryside in the background are admirable landscapes. In Saraceni’s curriculum, the work, as I see it, should be dated in the ve-year period 1605-1610”.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

Source: Luiz Marques (org.), Catalogue of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo: MASP, 1998. (new edition, 2008).



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