(Bologna 1638–1665)
(with the assistance of Giovanni Andrea Sirani, Bologna 1610–1670)
The Finding of Moses,
oil on unlined canvas, 112.5 x 130 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, South America;
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Adelina Modesti for confirming the attribution of the present painting and for her help in cataloguing.

Elisabetta Sirani was the more famous daughter of the established Bolognese artist and art merchant, Giovanni Andrea Sirani, Guido Reni’s prime assistant. In turn, Elisabetta became a professional painter and printmaker, a master of the Sirani workshop by her early twenties when her father could no longer paint due to illness. She was also a Professor at the Accademia di San Luca, Rome, and one of the first woman artists in Europe to establish a school of art and design for female students, which included her two sisters Barbara and Anna Maria. Elisabetta became Bologna’s most celebrated and marketable woman artist, and her work was represented in major European collections even in her own short lifetime.

Elisabetta Sirani was instrumental in the development of the Bolognese School of painting in the mid-Seicento, a pivotal transitional figure in transmitting the popular elegant Baroque Classicism of Guido Reni, dominant in the first half of the century, to the following generations of artists. She furthermore was one of the most erudite, successful and prolific artists of the Bolognese Seicento, gaining many public commissions, critical acclaim and respect in a male dominated profession. Extremely productive and with an extraordinary speed of execution, renowned for being able to finish a portrait bust in one sitting, Elisabetta completed just over 200 canvases (most of which the artist documented in her work diary Nota delle pitture fatte da me Elisabetta Sirani, later published by Conte Carlo Cesare Malvasia in his Felsine Pittrice of 1678), 15 prints and innumerable drawings and wash sketches in a professional career that barely spanned more than a decade (1654–1665). Elisabetta quickly became one of the most sought after and collected Bolognese artists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as archival documentation has confirmed, with her work now represented in major public and many private collections throughout the world.

An ‘ultrafashionable’ High Baroque artist, Elisabetta Sirani was extremely popular and highly talented, admired for her technical bravura and artistic virtuosity: she developed in her elegant and erudite canvases an expressive and quick painterly style with broad brushwork and fluid impasto (sprezzatura), coupled with intense exquisite colouring (colorito) and deep shadows (chiaroscuro).

This is evident in the present Finding of Moses, with its colour palette ranging from light pinks and blue-greys to deep greens, ochres and reds. Contrasting with the intense light that falls on the Egyptian princess and the baby Moses whom she has found hidden amongst the reeds in the river Nile, are the dark shadows that envelop the scene and figures in the background, itself opening onto a light filled misty blue landscape through which we can see the river snakes. Moses had been placed on the reedy banks of the Nile by his Hebrew mother, to save him from the slaughter of the innocents ordered by the Pharaoh to reduce the Israelite population. Adopted by the Pharaoh’s daughter, represented here beautifully adorned and bejeweled with pearls and precious stones, Moses became the prophet leader of the Israelites, whom he led to safety out of Egypt where they had been enslaved.

Elisabetta’s characteristic broad and fluid brushwork is evident in the expressive treatment of draperies, as well as in the impasto of the figures’ features and skin.

Modesti has dated the present painting to the early 1660s, when the artist was moving away from the Reni derived models of her early work and beginning to add more drama and deeper shadows to her paintings. There are similarities in the facial types to other female figures painted by Elisabetta Sirani around this period, such as the 1657 Allegory of Virtue, the 1660 Cumaean Sibyl, and the Madonna of the Girdle of 1663. The features of the Egyptian princess especially recall those of the Flint Cleopatra, especially of note are the same almond shaped eyes with the arch of the eyebrows, and the wide bridge of the nose. The pearl earrings of both figures also feature an identical white highlight reflection.

Particularly noteworthy is the naturalistic treatment of the head and face of the female attendant holding the infant (perhaps his Hebrew wet nurse) which is closely aligned to the naturalism of the head of Anna Maria Ranuzzi, painted by Elisabetta in 1665 in an Allegory of Charity. Also remarkable are the hands of this female attendant, whilst the pose and positioning of the princess finds an echo in Elisabetta’s 1664 Portia.

The still life arrangement in the centre of the canvas in the immediate foreground is also striking: the flower petals and leaves have been painted with a sureness yet lightness of touch which renders palpable their delicate and fragile nature, perhaps alluding to the precarious fate from which the infant has been saved. Elisabetta often included such still life details in her works, such as the Portrait of a Boy of 1657 (now in a private collection, see Modesti 2014, plate 4), or the 1662 Saint Antony of Padua in Adoration of the Christ Child in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna (Modesti 2014, plate 22).

Elisabetta Sirani does not register a work of this subject in her Nota, nor is there any mention of a Moses by her hand in the surviving documents and inventories. Thus, we cannot identify the patron for whom the work was painted. There is, however, a drawing of the Finding of Moses at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, once attributed to Elisabetta, but now given to the Lombard artist Il Montalto. The drawing, Adelina Modesti believes, should be returned to Elisabetta Sirani’s graphic oeuvre as it bears all the hallmarks of her fluid wash technique and figural types.

It appears that Elisabetta had some assistance in the production of this work. The two figures in the left background, especially recall the style of Elisabetta’s father Giovanni Andrea Sirani. The two artists often collaborated on works that were produced in the Sirani workshop, which was one of the most successful and productive workshops in mid-seicento Bologna. The concetto for the subject, which features women at its core, as were often highlighted in the work of Elisabetta Sirani, along with the overall composition of the present work, are clearly by this important and influential woman artist.