(Bologna 1610–1670)
Fortune with a Crown,
oil on canvas, 139 x 99 cm, framed

We are grateful to Massimo Pulini for confirming the attribution on the basis of a photograph.

The allegorical composition of the present painting was originally developed by Guido Reni (1575–1642).

Fortune, the Roman goddess of good fortune, is portrayed with some of the attributes which characterise her late medieval and Renaissance iconography. She is depicted suspended in mid-air, over a dark globe, her hair blown by the wind and pulled by the winged Amor.

According to Baldinucci’s Notizie de’ professori del disegno (1702), the original version of this composition was painted by Guido Reni for the Bolognese Abbot Giovanni Carlo Gavotti, and showed Fortuna holding a purse (see F. Baldinucci, Notizie de’ Professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, V, Florence 1702, pp. 327-328). The present version includes a crown instead of the purse, and this alteration was devised by Reni for a second painting of the subject, documented in 1638 by Luca Assarino (see L. Assarino, Sensi di umiltà e di stupor intorno la grandezza dell’Eminentissimo Cardinale Sacchetti, e le pitture di Guido Reni, Genoa 1646, 27) and later purchased by Monsignor Jacopo Altoviti (see F. Baldinucci, Ibid., 1707, p. 327). Reni’s composition was well received, and the iconography was diffused due to versions, such as the present work, produced by his studio. Giovanni Andrea Sirani was the most significant of its members. When the present work is compared to Reni’s composition it is apparent that Giovanni Andrea Sirani has here extended the area of the sky above Fortune’s head.

Born in Bologna in 1610, Sirani was initially trained by Giacomo Cavedone (1577–1660), a student of the Carracci and later entered the studio of Guido Reni where he remained until the end of the master’s life, as his principal assistant. The importance of the decade Sirani spent with Reni cannot be overestimated, as it played a major role in the artist’s development; most of his production presents, in fact, a strong stylistic affinity with the work of Guido Reni. The biographer Malvasia mentions in his Felsina Pittrice, that Reni would often retouch some of Sirani’s work, sometimes resulting in confusion regarding attributions (see B. Bohn, The construction of artistic reputation in Seicento Bologna: Guido Reni and the Sirani, in: Renaissance Studies, vol. 25, no. 4, 2010, pp. 511-537, 512).

An early version of Fortune holding the crown, also considered to be by Sirani, is conserved in the Accademia di San Luca, Rome, and has been documented since 1647. The history of its attribution can explain Malvasia’s comments on the similarity of Reni’s and Sirani’s painterly style: this work was originally attributed to Sirani and then subsequently considered to be a work by Reni in the eighteenth century, before being more recently reassigned to Sirani (see S. Pepper, D. Mahon, Guido Reni’s ‘Fortuna with a Purse’ Rediscovered, in: The Burlington Magazine, vol. 141, no. 1152, 1999, pp. 156–163; see Appendix).