Page 39 - GUIDO RENI 2017

S ince the painting is unlined, an inventory
number, 115, is clearly visible on the verso.
Extensive research relating to this number had
previously yielded no information and it was only
after Keith Christiansen’s initial, brilliant suggestion
and further study and consultation that Aidan Weston-
Lewis fortuitously made a second search on the Getty
Provenance Index under ‘Reni’ rather than ‘115’. This
immediately threw up the Borghese 1693 inventory
with the remarkable indication that the Country Dance
was fully recorded as by Reni and in fact, some forty
years earlier, was again also recorded in the Borghese
collection. As Aidan Weston-Lewis has observed, it
is ‘inconceivable’ that years after Reni’s demise such
an atypical early work should be fully attributed to
the master without concrete evidence or documentary
grounds. Both the present writer, Aidan Weston-
Lewis and Keith Christiansen point to the distinct
similarities in the landscape of the present picture
with that in the Albenga Martyrdom of St. Catherine of
Alexandria (Fig. 14) (discovered and published by the
writer together with Stephen Pepper16), as well as
with the ex-Rau David and Goliath. The ex-Coombs Fig. 14. Guido Reni, Martyrdom of St. Catherine of Alexandria,
Rest on the Flight also coincidentally comes from the Albenga, Museo Diocesano.
same Borghese collection (Manilli 1650, p.111 ‘Nel
Camerino, che segue pieno tutto di quadri piccoli, la Madonnina vicino al Letto, alla quale un’Angelo presenta una tazza di
frutti, è di Guido Reni’) and again in the 1693 inventory: ‘Sotto al detto un quadretto simile (alto un palmo in circa) La
Madonna il Bambino San Giuseppe e S. Gio. con un Angelo che porta una canestra di frutti de N.o 485 cornice dorata di Guido

16. Patrick Matthiesen and Stephen Pepper: ‘Guido Reni: an Early Masterpiece Discovered in Liguria,’ Apollo, xci, 1970, pp.
452-62. For a full discussion of the discovery of this painting see also London, Matthiesen Gallery, 2001:An Art Odyssey 1500-
1720, pp.21-29.

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