MASP

By Cristiane Rebello Nascimento
Pascoli notes that Mazzuoli would have carved a statue of Diana for Cardinal Barberini in the same period he sold his Adonis to the Cardinal. But at a certain time in Rome, the Sleeping Diana became traditionally attributed to the great Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Naples 1598 – Rome, 1680). As Bernini worked for Urban vIII (Maffeo Barberini) during his entire papacy, and thereafter for his nephew-cardinals, we might conclude that this attribution was due to the location of the statue in the family palace and to its generic similarities with Bernini’s style. The first author to take up the issue of the authorship of the Diana was Fraschetti (1900, pp. 138-139). He notices that the graceful features bear a certain resemblance to Bernini’s juvenile works, but discards the possibility of the work being his. In 1916, Muñoz dates the work as belonging to the last quarter of the 17th century and suggests that the Antiquity-like features of the statue, already noticed by Fraschetti, do not warrant the attribution to Bernini. In an article in 1952 (pp. 55-57), Pietro Maria Bardi, then Curator of Masp, unsuccessfully attempted to rescue the traditional hypothesis of Bernini’s authorship, which he believed to be the work’s only reliable attribution. As early as in 1928, Rudolf Suboff had included the Diana in the reviews on Giuseppe Mazzuoli, taking heed, for the first time, of Pascoli’s observation, briefly repeated by Della Valle (1786, p. 445). Soon thereafter, he definitely incorporated it in the corpus of the sculptor’s works (1930, p. 319). Riccoboni (1942, pp. 233-234), after Pascoli and Suboff, posed the hypothesis of a dating around 1703. But the most widely accepted date for its execution is that of 1709 (Martinelli 1987, p. 21y and Gentilini and Sisi 1989, p. 267), since according to the biographer the Diana was carved during the last years of the execution of the Adonis statue, signed in 1709 (Faldi 1960, p. 134). This date, however, must be discarded in light of the settlement of the estate of the Barberini palace, which took place in 1yoo and was published by Montagu (1991, p. 200, n. 15). Through it, we are informed that in that year, the Diana was on the sarcophagus that accompanied it to the Masp, which suggests an earlier date of execution in the last years of the 17th century. The estate inventory has also enabled us to determine which of the Barberini cardinals commissioned the statue: cardinal-nephew Francesco (1597-1679), vice-chancellor of the Church and founder of the Barberini Library. The theme of the Sleeping Diana only emerged in the 16th century, as a variation of the modern theme depicting a nymph asleep by a fountain. Its first important visual precedent is the ancient statue of Cleopatra or, as was later discovered, the Sleeping Ariadne that, in 1512, was put together with an ancient sarcophagus as a fountain at the Belvedere, in the Vatican. This example inspired the creation of several private fountains during that century, such as the fountain of the gardens of Cardinal Domenico della Rovere, cousin of Julius II, the one in the Cesi gardens, as well as the famous fountain of the Horti colotiani. In an engraving by Francisco de Holanda, Ariadne was placed in a niche from which the water ran into a sarcophagus beneath it, which served as a basin. The model of this iconography was literary: the allegoric novel entitled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, written by Francesco Colonna and published in Venice in 1499, by Aldo Manuzio, which described fantastic gardens, such as the garden of Venus, in which the main element is a “soporata nympha”. The same kind of thematic derivation was observed in painting. As from 1518, Lucas Cranach, the Elder (1472-1553), painted a series of pictures of nymphs asleep by a fountain. In some of these compositions he introduced features traditionally associated with Diana: the arch and the quiver with arrows and a group of deer. This is not yet a Sleeping Diana but only a “Nympha sculpta iacens sub phatre & arcu”, described in the “Inscriptiones sacrosanctae vestustatis of Apianus” (1534). It is not unlikely that Masp’s Sleeping Diana was conceived in connection with a fountain, although there are no actual records of this. There is evidence of it: the quality of the richly veined marble and its association with the Roman sarcophagus kept at the Barberini palace until the Masp acquired both pieces. An important precedent which, according to Pansecchi, is the immediate model for the Masp’s Sleeping Diana, is the fountain of Diana placed at an intersection outside the palace, in the Quadrivio delle Quatro Fontane, also from the 16th century (1959, p. 36). At any rate, the statue-sarcophagus association evidences the scholarly taste of the collections of that period, illustrated by Cardinal Francesco’s Collection. In this latter case it can undoubtedly be considered a reference to the Roman models of fountains with sleeping nymphs. The theme of the Sleeping Diana, which achieved great success in French 18th-century painting, has another important visual precedent from the mid-1640s: the fresco depicting a sleeping Diana by Pietro da Cortona on the ceiling of the Pitti palace in Florence. Here, the association with the fountain is not present. Cortona inserts the Diana in a decorative design, whose central theme is appeasement, thereby stressing the goddess’ lunar trait as a mediator of passions.

— Cristiane Rebello Nascimento, 1998

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