The last couple of months have seen the announcement by several institutions of acquisitions of artwork inspired by the ancient world. A rare history painting by the French artist Marie-Guillemine Benoist (1768-1826) has recently joined the collections of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, going on view at the Legion of Honor in March for its first public display since 1791. In that year, Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell became the first history painting by a woman to be exhibited at the Salon in Paris. The guide by the French Academy of Fine Arts said, ‘I thought that women were hardly capable of composing history paintings, above all to this degree of perfection.’ It was the French Revolution that enabled Benoist, who trained with Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun and Jacques-Louis David, to exhibit as a history painter at the Salon. The Academy only admitted women as painters of still-life or portraits, but, with the Revolution, artists who were not members of the Academy were allowed to take part in the Salon.
While Psyche is a popular subject in art, she often appears with Cupid. Benoist instead focuses on an earlier episode of the story told by Roman author Apuleius in his Metamorphoses and 18th-century poet Charles Demoustier: the princess leaving her family to be sacrificed to the monster she has been prophesised to marry, in order to save her father’s kingdom.
On the East Coast of the United States, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has acquired a Renaissance roundel in bronze with gilding and silver inlay, attributed to an Italian goldsmith working in the Gonzaga court in Mantua, Gian Marco Cavalli (c.1454-after 1508). The allegorical composition shows a mighty golden-winged Venus in the centre, with Cupid, her lover Mars, and her husband Vulcan working on a helmet. A loop at the top of the relief meant that it could hang like a painting, possibly in the studiolo (cabinet) of the Marchioness of Mantua, Isabella d’Este. Isabella – a powerful patron – was compared to Venus in art, for example in the 1497 Parnassus by Andrea Mantegna, the principal painter to the Gonzaga court, which hung in the studiolo in the Ducal Palace and also features Venus, Mars, Cupid, and Vulcan.
Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, which celebrates its 125th birthday on 1 May, has added to its collection of Danish art a painting on another mythological theme by Danish Golden Age painter Christen Købke (1810-1848). A Bacchante on a Sea Tiger (1839) is one of four works Købke produced while in Rome, Naples, and Capri. Unlike the other three Italian works, which are landscapes, this new acquisition shows a Pompeiian motif, a worshipper of Bacchus riding a sinuous sea creature and pouring it wine, on a dark red background, altogether resembling a Roman wall painting. It is an unusual theme for Købke, who is best known for his portraits and landscapes, but not uncommon for the period. ‘The museum has several works from the Golden Age portraying archaeological finds. The work by Købke is a significant contribution to this category,’ said Gertrud Hvidberg-Hansen, the Glyptotek’s director.
