Pietro Liberi

Pietro Liberi trained with Alessandro Varotari, called il Padovanino (1588–1649), and travelled fairly extensively around Europe and Italy before returning to Venice, where he spent most of his career. His artistic output, which included numerous frescoes, was prolific and varied, but he enjoyed perhaps most success with mythological scenes, which were highly sought after by his aristocratic patrons in Venice, as well as in the Imperial Court following his trip to Austria, Hungary and Bohemia in 1658–59.

It is to these years that the present painting most probably dates. The female figures may be compared to those in other works produced by Liberi during this period: The Apotheosis of Emperor Leopold I, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. no. 6206),¹ and Diana and Actaeon, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin (inv. no. 455).² This painting is undoubtedly a homage to Titian's famous depiction of the subject, today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum (inv. no. 71),³ which Liberi would have seen in the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614–62), it having been brought from his Picture Gallery in Brussels to Vienna in 1656.

Liberi painted the subject on at least two other occasions. Two paintings now in the State Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, for which sketches also exist, portray Diana and Callisto in upright format (inv. no. ГЭ-7796),⁴ and – closer to the present work – in a large landscape canvas datable to the 1670s (inv. no. ГЭ-217).⁵

The attribution to Liberi has been endorsed in a written expertise by Professor Ugo Ruggeri.

An alternative attribution Federico Cervelli (1625–1700), who established his workshop in Venice in around 1655, has also been proposed.

¹ https://www.khm.at/objektdb/detail/1074/

² https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pietro_Liberi_Diana_y_Acte%C3%B3n_1660_Staatliche_Museen_Berl%C3%ADn.jpg

³ https://www.khm.at/en/objectdb/detail/1953/?lv=detail

⁴ https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/digital-collection/01.+paintings/32316. A sketch for this painting is in the Uffizi, Florence (inv. 1890, no. 9462; see U. Ruggeri, Pietro e Marco Liberi. Pittori nella Venezia del Seicento, Rimini 1996, p. 195, no. P180, reproduced p. 194.

⁵ https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/digital-collection/01.+paintings/32302. A sketch for this painting is in the collection of Viscount Scarsdale at Kedleston Hall (see Ruggeri 1996, p. 192, no. P174, reproduced).