MASP

Michele Rocca

The Toilette of Venus, 1710-20

  • Author:
    Michele Rocca
  • Bio:
    Parma, Itália, 1666-Veneza, Itália ,1752
  • Title:
    The Toilette of Venus
  • Date:
    1710-20
  • Medium:
    Óleo sobre tela
  • Dimensions:
    48 x 63,5 x 2,5 cm
  • Credit line:
    Doação Banco Hipotecário Lar Brasileiro S.A., 1947
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00032
  • Photography credits:
    João Musa

TEXTS


By Luciano Migliaccio
In a small wood surrounded by mountains, Venus is carrying out her toilette, assisted by nymphs and Cupid, as if she were about to keep a tryst. The goddess is sitting on a rock, gazing into a mirror held by her companions kneeling before her. The others around her are fetching her jewels. The boy Cupid plays with the wreath, showing it to two young girls sitting nearby. One of them eyes him fascinated; the other is pensive, her back to him. In the second scene, Paris, on the left in shepherd’s costume, reclines on a rock and watches the three nude goddesses. Closer by, Juno touches her breast with her right hand, hinting at a reward for the young man if she is judged the most beautiful. At the feet of the goddess, a boy holds a cornucopia full of luscious delicacies that spill over onto the ground. Venus, seated between her two rivals, reaches for the pome still held by Paris. Embarrassed Minerva covers herself with her shield while a boy beside her plays with the weapons she has laid down. The two pictures – The Toilette of Venus and The Judgement of Paris – form a pair. They are identical in size and the themes are successive moments in a single narrative. Together with the judgment of Paris and in the tradition of classical mythology, the painter wished to develop a gallant digression by showing Venus putting on cosmetics with the help of the goddesses of the springs and of her son, Cupid. The interpretation of the myth, humanized and treated with vivacious realism, like a pastoral idyll full of ironic episodes, is typical of the culture of the first twenty-five years of the 18th century, which was heavily influenced by Louis XV’s French court. Affability, rationality, humor, and gallantry were the values that substituted the grandiloquence of the century before. This culture was expressed in the works of many Italian painters, especially Venetians and Neapolitans, who worked not only on the peninsula but also in courts throughout Europe. Among them was Michele Rocca. The two Masp pictures show how, while far from Rome, he developed a style very similar to that of the mythological pictures of the Venetian Jacopo Amigoni (1682-1752), to the point that he could almost be taken for him. Like Amigoni, the author of the São Paulo canvases shows that he was influenced by the painting of Luca Giordano and Paolo de Matteis in the interpretation of the motifs as well as in the form taken by clothing and in the harmony of the colors, dark blue and yellow, moss green and yellow with violet. Typically Amigonian is the landscape with clouds and mountains shaped through strokes of dense color and a keen sense of light, while in the bodies the sfumato curves bring out the soft female flesh. There is a touch of the manner of Parmigianino added to the composition, to be seen in the Venus gazing at herself in the mirror. The whole work denotes the painter’s ability to assimilate elements from French culture in an original and up-to-date way when it was brought to Parma during the early Settecento. Without solid grounds for doing so, the works were attributed to Nicolas Lancret in the Guerra Duval auction catalogue, before being acquired by the Masp, which attributed them to Michele Rocca.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1999

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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