17th Century, Emilian School, Venus, Cupid and dove

17th Century, Emilian School Venus, Cupid and dove Oil on canvas, 98 x 73.5 cm With frame, 113 x 89 cm The proud and enigmatic gaze turned towards the viewer, the sensually suggestive pose as well as the presence of a dove and a small cherub, identified as Cupid, allow us to recognize in this enigmatic female figure the features of Venus, goddess of Love and Beauty. The author of this work is an artist belonging to the Emilian school of painting of the 17th century. Based on compositional and formal evidence, it is possible to assert that the painter was influenced by Carlo Cignani (Bologna 1628 - Forlì 1719), a famous student of Francesco Albani and one of the most accredited masters of the Emilian 17th century, very close to the present painting with his Venus and Cupid now kept at the Galleria Sabauda in Turin. Propagator of a language faithful to the canons of Bolognese classicism of the Carracci, Cignani acquired and sustained increasingly baroque forms, reaching the appointment of prince of the Academy of San Luca in 1710. Active in Bologna, then in Parma, he spent the last period of his career in Forlì, expanding the circle of his students, who in turn were decisive in the codification of the late seventeenth-century and neo-eighteenth-century Emilian taste. Regarding the present painting, as comparisons, it is impossible not to connect the heroic women painted by Elisabetta Sirani and her workshop of students, celebrated in the psychological type and in the technicalities used, in the present, to shape the volumes of the flesh and to sprout feathers and crumpled robes of characters and figured animals. The credible comparisons with the painting under examination range from Venus with Cupid by the aforementioned Sirani (BPEr Banca collection), more pompously baroque, to Venus and Cupid executed by Gianandrea Sirani, Elisabetta's father, now kept in a private collection. A similar figural treatment, although declined in a more languid and less decisive presentation than the present one, recurs in Venus with Cupid and cherubs, the work of an anonymous Bolognese artist of the 17th century, protagonist of the same cultural climate as our artist. If Marcantonio Franceschini adheres to these canons with a similar painting in a private collection, with the canvas Pomona (private collection) and Venus and Cupid (G.M.B. Vignola, Emilia Romagna) he reaches results of absolute similarity to the present.