MASP

According to W. Friedländer (1967, p. 153) the iconography of this work was inspired by Vincenzo Cartari’s Immagini degli Dei (Padua 1556, p.172). The story is of the Athenian ephebe, Hymenaeus, who does not dare to propose to his beloved because of his lower social position, so he disguises himself as a woman slave in order to be near her during a ritual celebration in honor of Priapus (the deity of gardens and fertility). Hymenaeus is represented at the right of the picture, while his beloved is probably the young woman kneeling before the revered image. The romance ends in marriage, of which the hero becomes a symbol for having obtained the hand of his beloved in reward for saving the virgins from pirates. Although the iconographic identification suggested by Friedländer seems convincing, according to Cartari’s version, Hymenaeus is a witness to a mystery of the goddess Demeter in honor of Eleusis, rather than to a sacrifice to Priapus as imagined by Poussin. This work forms a pendant with another of similar size (160 x 360 cm) titled Off to the Hunt or The Hunt of Meleagro, at the Prado, although it is difficult to conceive an iconographic program encompassing the creation of both works. Although there is no longer any real reticence about the picture, lingering doubts in postwar historiography as to the authorship of the Masp work – Hymenaeus Disguised as a Woman during an Offering to Priapus – were partially due to the absence of printed reproductions of the work and particularly to indirect information since visibility was impaired by dirt and oxidation of the varnish. Grautoff (1914, n. 55), Magne (1914, n. 41), Friedländer (1915), Blunt (n. 163), and Wild (1980), among others, accepted the authorship without restrictions. Thuillier brought up the issue of attribution in 1988. In 1974, he had suggested attributing at least the Prado picture to Charles Errard. Without extending this attribution to the Masp’s picture at issue, due to “a quite different style”, Thuillier insisted on reconsidering attribution to Poussin. Echoing this reticence and expanding on the difficulty of determining a coherent date for the work within the years 1636-1640, Wright (1984, p. 243, A25) for his part did not include the painting in the catalogue of works securely attributed to the master and preferred to group it together with the Madrid painting “in limbo, hoping that more research and a possible scientific examination may clarify the matter”. Restating the proposal that there was a stylistic distance separating the work in Madrid from the one in São Paulo which dates from “much later”, Mérot goes no further than saying that the attribution “must be treated cautiously”. In 1994 (n. 115 and 116) however, Thuillier returned to the issue, clearly confirming attribution of the Masp and Prado paintings to Poussin and also firmly dating both of them between 1634 to 1638. The basic assumptions regarding the provenance of the work weigh in favor of attribution to Poussin. One hypothesis has it coming from the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo, the greatest Roman collector of Poussin’s works. Supporting this proposal is an unpublished letter in the Masp archives dated April 8th, 1964, from Sir Anthony Blunt to the then director of the Masp, P. M. Bardi: “Mrs. Henri Frankfort of the Warburg Institute discovered in the Museum at Lisbon a late 18th-century drawing after the painting, probably made to be engraved with an inscription which shows quite clearly that the picture then formed part of the Spanish Royal Collection. This confirms a theory which I had previously put forward, that it is a pair to the big ‘Hunt’ still in the Prado that has almost precisely the same dimensions, which are altogether exceptional for Poussin. Both pictures are recorded in the inventory of the Royal Collection made in 1701 at the death of Charles II. The fact that the two pictures are a pair also lends color to a theory that I had proposed, namely that the two paintings come from the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo, Poussin’s best patron in Rome. One of the accounts of his collection describes two pictures, one of a hunt and the other a Sacrifice (...) and there is every probability, since the two pictures are mentioned together in the account, that they correspond to the two paintings in question. We know nothing of how they got to Spain, but they might well have been sent as a present to the King, either by the Pope or by some pro-Spanish cardinal. Presumably, your picture disappeared from the Royal Collection at the time of the Peninsular War”. A second theory was proposed by Thuillier, who kindly restated it in a letter sent to this writer on December 4th, 1997: “J’estime peu vraisemblable une provenance Dal Pozzo, je vous l’avoue, et crois à une commande du roi d’Espagne, ce qui expliquerait le format exceptionnel (à peu près exclu pour les pièces assez étroites de la maison du collectionneur)”. Lastly, according to an old undocumented tradition, the work was allegedly commissioned by the Palazzo Borghese in Rome. In any event, the painting belonged to the Spanish Royal Collections from at least 1701, the date of the Palacio del Buen Retiro inventory. Datings ranging from 1634 to 1644 have been proposed, the most probable of them being Thuillier’s (1634-1638), which has also been supported by P. Joannides (verbal communication).

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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