The Temple of Minerva Medica

The Expertise

This painting is a work added to the repertory of Paolo Anesi, an artist born in Rome in July 1697. He came from a family of silk weavers who had moved from Venice in a moment when this city boasted the attentions of Pope Clement IX. Paolo cultivated friendships within the Roman artistic circle, managed himself well, worked for families like Colonna, Chigi, Torlonia and Albani, Doria Pamphili and Pallavicini, was received amongst both the “Virtuosi del Pantheon” and the “Accademici fiorentini di San Luca” (“Florentine Academists of St. Luke”). With his death, in 1773, that thriving period in the history of Roman landscape painting lasted nearly two centuries comes to an end. Francesco Maria Gaburri, Florentine, historian and lover of the arts, in his manuscript “Life of the Artists” dedicates to him the following “Portrait”: «Paolo Anesi, Roman painter was apprentice to Giuseppe Chiari, Florentine painter, for the figures and the landscapes he studied with Bernardino Fergioni, Roman. In making beautiful landscapes he is inferior to no painter in Rome [...] he combines the intelligence of painting with a sweetness of appearance and with such a humbleness that it is impossible to confer with him without being enchanted». For stylistic reasons, the painting at issue should belong to his later manner, having small elongated figures and a very diluted use of colour. The arrangement of the cracks in the paint and the quality of the pigment support such conjecture. The canvas is strictly related to “The Ruins of the Palatine” formerly in the Collection Sabatelli, reproduced on p. 216 of A. Busiri Vici’s “Trittico Paesistico Romano”, ed. Bozzi, 1976. (Rome, May 2002 - Franco Toscano)