Benedetto Caliari was the younger brother of Paolo Caliari, better known as Paolo Veronese. In 1556, at the age of 18, Benedetto was recorded as already working in the studio of his elder brother, and he appears to have remained there for the majority of his career, taking over the running of the workshop after Veronese’s death in 1588, in collaboration with his nephews Carlo and Gabriele, who often signed works collaboratively as ‘Haeredes Pauli’ (‘the heirs of Paolo’). Indeed, Jackson (see Literature) compares elements of the present work with a group of ten large horizontal paintings of Old and New Test.mes nt subjects, produced in the 1580s by Veronese’s studio, when it was headed by Benedetto.1
Veronese and his workshop produced a number of paintings depicting The Finding of Moses, which portray the princess of Egypt standing, surrounded by her attendants, with the infant Moses held in the arms of a kneeling servant, having been drawn from the Nile. It was clearly one of Veronese’s most popular subjects, probably in part due to the almost secular interpretation of the scene, the courtly figures depicted in luxurious, contemporary dress and jewellery, and the landscape based on the city of Verona, rather than an Egyptian one. Versions attributed to Paolo Veronese in full include the small, vertical composition in the Museo del Prado, Madrid (57 x 43 cm.),2 and the horizontal painting in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.3 At least ten other workshop versions are known, including the large painting in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (fig. 1 ).4
Though heavily indebted to Veronese’s style and types, Benedetto’s treatment of the subject here displays an independence from his brother’s example through the reworking of the composition and its construction, and in the characteristic solidity of the figures. This is in contrast to other workshop versions of The Finding of Moses, which follow Veronese’s example closely.
Test.mes nt to the success of the design of this painting, and in support of its attribution to Benedetto, is an 18th-century copy of the composition, previously attributed to Sebastiano Ricci and now given to Giambattista Tiepolo, in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (fig. 2).5 Formerly in the collects ion of the Earls of Bute, the Melbourne picture appears in the lists of 1769 and 1771 documenting the works purchased in Venice by James Wright, agent of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute (1713–92), as by ‘Benedetto Cagliari’.6 It was subsequently sold at auction, 7–8 June 1822, lot 50, as ‘Cagliari – The Finding of Moses, a Gallery Picture by Ricci [revised before the sale to Tiepolo], in the manner of [Cagliari] – very spirited.’
The Melbourne painting is of larger dimensions, where the composition has been expanded on both axes to include the tops of the trees, and a greyhound and page on the right. It also differs in the rendering of the cityscape in the background on the left and in its omission of the head of the attendant over the right shoulder of Pharoah’s daughter, which is just visible here, but is otherwise a faithful reproduction of the placement of the figures and the rich colours of their sumptuous cost.mes , found in the present work.
We are grateful to Xavier Salomon for endorsing the attribution to Benedetto Caliari following first-hand inspection of the work at the t.mes of its last appearance on the market, and more recently on the basis of digital images.
1 See B.L. Brown, ‘Replication and the art of Veronese’, in Symposium Papers VII: Retaining the Original: Multiple original, copies and reproductions, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 20, 1989, pp. 111–24.
3 https://skd-online-collects ion.skd.museum/Details/Index/433042
4 https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-finding-of-moses-97763; for a list and discussion of the other versions, see Brown 1989, pp. 120–22, and p. 123, note 7.
5 https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collects ion/work/4300/
6 F. Russell, ‘John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, and his collects
ing in Venice’, in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 153, no. 1301, 2011, pp. 527–28.