Marcantonio Franceschini

(Bologna 1648–1729)
Aeneas and Lavinia,
oil on shaped canvas, 168.5 x 187.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Bologna

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

The present painting is an early work by Marcantonio Franceschini, one of the most celebrated painters in Bologna during the final decades of the seventeenth, and the first of the eighteenth century. Given the particular shape of this canvas it was likely commissioned to ornament a lunette or serve as an over-door in an aristocratic palace.

The painting represents an episode from the mythic story of the founding of Rome: King Latinus offers the hand of his daughter Lavinia in marriage to Aeneas who has recently landed on the coast of Latium. However, she had previously been promised to Turnus, King of the Rutuli, and according to some of the ancient sources it was this episode that triggered the war between the local population and the newly arrived Trojans. At the centre of his composition Franceschini immortalizes the moment when the future bride and groom meet with the approbation of King Latinus while he represents the dead body of Turnus stretched out across the foreground. In the background, soldiers occupy a fortified city, while on the right there is a military encampment. The calibrated composition of the scene, its formal composure and classical measure, are the stylistic hallmarks of the artist’s production, including those works of his late maturity like the Death of Abele in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna. The figure types already reveal a response to Franceschini’s search for the perfect ideal pose, which would lead him to build up a repertory of attitudes to typify actions, which he was able to adapt to various contexts through his deployment of careful studies from life. For example, the image of Turnus’ dead body in the present painting, reworks that of the sleeping Ismael in the Hagar and Ismael in the desert preserved in the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola at Genoa, which is in turn evolved from the motif of a reclining figure seen in the Death of Adonis by Domenichino in Palazzo Farnese at Rome (see D. Miller, Marcantonio Franceschini, Turin 2001, pp. 10-11 and pp. 196-198, n. 95).

Marcantonio Franceschini trained in his native city at the school of Giovanni Maria Galli, called Bibiena, before entering the studio of Carlo Cignani, with whom he collaborated as an assistant in numerous frescoes. Moreover, on various occasions, alongside other artists like Luigi Quaini, Franceschini transposed the cartoons of his master into fresco cycles, as was the case with the Mythologies in the Palazzo del Giardino in Parma. From the 1680s Franceschini headed his own studio and was engaged in numerous fresco commissions in the palaces of the Bolognese nobility, in these his pictorial language progressed towards a greater formal purism derived from Domenichino, whose influence was to remain a constant through all his production. Franceschini principally worked in the Emilia region, apart from occasional visits to Genoa and Rome; he was an active participant in the establishment of the Accademia Clementina at Bologna, which opened in 1710.