Giovanni Giacomo Sementi

(Bologna 1580–1636 Rome)
Portia,
oil on canvas, 200 x 124 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private European collection

We are grateful to Daniele Benati for suggesting the attribution of the present painting on the basis of a high resolution digital photograph.

The present painting by Giovan Giacomo Sementi represents one of the most celebrated women in Roman history: Portia, who consequently belongs within the tradition of representations of the heroines of antiquity. Portia was the daughter of Cato Uticensis and the wife of Marcus Junius Brutus, one of the members of the conspiracy against Julius Caesar. She became the emblem for the incorruptibility and total devotion to the political ideals embodied by her father and her husband. Plutarch recounts in his Life of Brutus (18-26) how Portia, with her obstinate desire to play a part in the conspiracy against Caesar, inflicted a grave wound upon herself in order to demonstrate her strength of will to her husband. This episode is represented by another celebrated painter from Bologna, Elisabetta Siriani, in a painting presently conserved by the Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna (see A. Modesti, Elisabetta Sirani ‘Virtuosa’. Women’s Cultural Production in Early Modern Bologna, Turnhout 2014, pp. 337-338). The representation of her suicide however is more diffuse: despairing in the knowledge of her husband’s death at Philippi, Portia took her own life by swallowing hot coals (Plutarch 46-53). The iconography for this episode, which was current from the fifteenth century was adopted by various classicising painters during the seventeenth century, and among them, for example Pierre Mignard whose rendering of the scene is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes.

The painting presented here depicts the moment in which the heroine, alone in her room and certain of her decision, languidly prepares to take hold of the burning coals in the brazier with her left hand. She is the sole protagonist of the scene, and her figure is presented in all its monumental sensuality, filling the entire space of the canvas diagonally. The classical component of this painting reveals an artist who was profoundly influenced by the manner of Guido Reni.

Indeed, Giovan Giacomo Sementi was a pupil and collaborator of Guido Reni. His initial training however took place in the studio of Denys Calvaert, from whom he derived his late mannerist iridescent pallet, which typifies his early work. Sementi also collaborated with Francesco Albani on the mythological and allegorical frescoes for Palazzo Giustiniani (now Odescalchi) at Bassano di Sutri: an experience that lent his pictorial language certain components derived from the Carracci. From the 1620s the painter was based in Rome where he conducted the rest of his career. Significantly, Sementi was one of the few Bolognese painters to receive a biography by Giovanni Baglione (see G. Baglione, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti…, 1642, ed. Rome 1970, pp. 344-345).