(Castelfranco circa 1477 – before 1510)
The Finding of Paris; and
The Calydonian boar hunt,
oil on panel, each 36 x 27 cm, framed, a pair (2)

Provenance:
art market, Italy, 1977;
where acquired by the present owner

This pair of small panels were probably originally elements of a painted piece of furniture. The first depicts the Finding of Paris. According to the Iliad, Paris’ mother had a prophetic dream foreseeing the destruction of Troy. Frightened, she decided to abandon her newborn son on the slopes of Mount Ida, where he was found and raised by a shepherd. The second panel, depicting a huntress and a soldier, is harder to interpret, but is probably also based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It may refer to the story of the Calydonian boar hunt: Atalanta was the first to wound the animal and received its fur as award, after Meleager dealt the death blow.

Between the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Ovid’s texts became widely popular, aided by the spread of engravings depicting these subjects and the publication of the first illustrated edition of the Metamorphoses in 1497. In his treatise Le maraviglie dell’arte (Venice 1648, p. 79), Carlo Ridolfi recalls that Giorgione ‘painted shields, wardrobes, and many chests on which he principally depicted Ovid’s fables’, also confirming the Venetian preference for painted furniture.

The influence of Giorgione’s style is evident in these paintings, both in the classicising and allegorical representation of the natural landscape and in the figures’ poses. For instance, there are notable similarities with the painter’s most famous work, The Tempest (Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, inv. no. 915), or with the fragmentary Finding of Paris in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (inv. no. 95), possibly a copy of a lost Giorgione painting.