(Pistoia 1606–1681 Rome)
An Allegory of War,
oil on canvas, 133 x 98 cm, framed

Inscribed on two labels on the stretcher:
Rosa Caval. Michele Modena / e Milano; and
L’Iconoclasta / Collezione d’arte / March. Degl. Albizi

Provenance:
Giacinto Gimignani collection, Rome before 1681 (see documentation);
Cavalier Michele Rosa collection, Modena and Milan (according to a label on the reverse);
Marchese degli Albizi collection (according to a label on the reverse);
Private European collection, since circa 1940

Documentation:
The painting is mentioned in the post-mortem inventory of Giacinto Gimignani, 31 December 1681, Rome: ‘La Guerra che concili d’armi, tela da Imp.’ (see U. V. Fischer Pace, Giacinto Gimignani [1606-1681]. Eine Studie zur römischen Malerei des Seicento, dissertation, Freiburg 1973, p. 127)

We are grateful to Ursula Verena Fischer Pace for confirming the attribution after examining the painting in the original. She intends to publish this painting in her forthcoming monograph on the artist.

The allegorical figure of war is personified by a woman wearing a cuirass and helmet, armed with a sword and shield which is decorated with the wolf’s head, in accordance with descriptions given in the iconographic manuals of the period. In her wake lies a city in flames, broken trees and skies blackened by clouds of smoke. Wherever War goes, she sows destruction: the ruin of material wealth and ideal riches are symbolised respectively by gold and silver vases and a smashed antique statue trodden underfoot, along with the attributes of the arts, a lute and violin representing music, books for poetry, a setsquare and compass for architecture, and, for painting, brushes, a palette and the portrait of a woman.

This work can be attributed, on stylistic and documentary grounds, to the Tuscan painter Giacinto Gimignani, who settled in Rome and was active there, in Palazzo Barberini under the egis of Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669), from 1630. Subsequently, during the 1630s, with the aid of his compatriot and protector Giulio Rospigliosi, who later became Pope Clement IX, but at that time was a poet and member of the curia of the Barberini court, and of the painter Alessandro Turchi, whose daughter Cecilia, Gimignani was to marry in 1640, Gimignani entered the francophile circle of Cardinal Maurizio di Savoia and the French painters in Rome around Nicolas Poussin. Gimignani was the only Italian painter, alongside the French painters François Perrier, Pierre Mignard, Pierre Lemaire and Charles Errard, to participate in an important commission in 1639 for sixteen paintings, representing stories from the Gerusalemme Liberata of Torquato Tasso, for the Parisian residence of Maréchal de La Ferté-Senneterre (see U. V. Fischer Pace, in: Intorno a Poussin. Ideale classico e epopea barocca tra Parigi e Roma, exhibition catalogue, Rome 2000, pp.128-130).

It is likely that the present painting was executed around the mid-1640s around the same time that Gimignani painted the Death of Virginia in 1644 which was formerly in the Scardeoni collection, Lugano (see A. Lo Bianco [ed.], Pietro da Cortona: 1597-1668, exhibition catalogue, Milan 1997, p. 205, fig. 171).

Gimignani’s early style of painting was influenced by Pietro da Cortona, but he developed stylistically towards a calmer classicism incorporating a lively palette of colour, while his subject matter evolved to a more moral and allegorical content, to mythology and episodes from the bible, as well as ancient history.

In addition to the stylistic evidence characteristic of Gimignani’s work, Fischer Pace has identified a preparatory drawing for this painting in a Spanish collection (see fig. 1). The figure of War, the broken antique statue and the vases on the ground are identical but the attributes of the arts are absent. The drawing forms a pair with an Allegory of Peace of the same size and in the same media.

According to Fischer Pace, the present painting is the one mentioned in Giacinto Gimignani’s post-mortem inventory, of 31 December 1681, recording his property at his house in Strada Felice (now via Sistina), Rome, wherein are listed ‘La Guerra che concili d’armi, tela da Imp.’ with its pendant ‘La Pace che concili d’armi, tela da Imp.’. The imperial size canvas corresponds with the dimensions of the present painting (see documentation). At present, the subsequent changes of ownership after the painting left the artist’s studio are not known, however some indications are given by a wax seal at lower left on the back of the canvas, and by the nineteenth and twentieth century labels on the back of the stretcher that mention a Cavalier Michele Rosa in Modena and Milan and the Albizi collection.

This painting is an important addition to Gimignani’s corpus of works, and it is a significant example of his preference for depicting allegorical and moral subjects in keeping with the rhetorical pictorial language of the early Roman Baroque.

We are grateful to Ursula Verena Fischer Pace for cataloguing this lot.