Gian Battista Tiepolo
The Banquet of Cleopatra
1743–44

Cleopatra’s wager with Mark Antony that she would spend a fortune on a single banquet is a subject rarely treated in painting. Tiepolo found less inspiration in other renderings of the theme than in the festive biblical banquets in sixteenth-century Venetian settings painted by Paolo Veronese. Just as The Banquet appears seemingly without precursors, so it had no visible followers: the subject lives in our imagination as Tiepolo created it, just as Don Juan remains forever associated with Mozart’s opera.

Tiepolo treated the theme a number of times in the 1740s. The Melbourne Banquet was finished for Count Algarotti, who seems to have urged the artist to introduce the sculptures of the sphinx and of Isis and Serapis to lend to the sixteenth-century Venetian setting a touch of historical truth.

The picture did not please King Augustus III of Saxony, for whom Algarotti had ordered it, and he banished it to his hunting lodge prior to selling it some twenty years later, when the vogue for Neoclassicism had begun to replace the rococo fantasies of Tiepolo.

The picture was sold at Amsterdam in 1765 and purchased for Catherine II of Russia. Offered on the English art market in 1933, it was acquired under the terms of the Felton Bequest.

Jacopo Amiconi
Farinelli and his Friends
c. 1751

A number of people important in the history of music are here assembled in a ‘friendship picture’, which Carlo Broschi Farinelli (1705–82), Europe’s most famous castrato singer of the century, commissioned shortly before his retirement to remind him of his proud days at the Spanish court.

Holding a sheet of music, one of his favourite songs composed by himself, the singer is accompanied by his dog and his page, whose gaily coloured Hungarian uniform echoes the rose pink and sky blue in the costumes of Farinelli and of the soprano Teresa Castellini. On the far left appears Metastasio, the court poet at Vienna, who wrote many of Farinelli’s libretti; his figure has been copied from another portrait. Farinelli seems also to have invited the painter to join him; and Amiconi, in his smock, stands with his arm round his patron’s shoulder. Well versed in courtly manners, the protagonists present themselves with the aplomb of stage performers.

Vernon Lee, Charles Burney and other writers attributed the painting to Farinelli’s Venetian period, but it is clear that it must have been painted in Spain, since Farinelli wears the order of Calatrava bestowed on him by Ferdinand VI in 1750.

Florentine School
Profile Portrait of a Lady
1450–75

The small picture has the brilliance of a many-faceted jewel. The horns of the Burgundian headdress give an exotic, mask-like quality to the elaborate silhouette of the head. The meticulously outlined profile shares precision of form with the elaborate pieces of jewellery which adorn the richly brocaded dress and the headband. The portrait is part of a group of Florentine profile portraits dating from the middle of the fifteenth century, some of which have been attributed to the goldsmith, sculptor and painter Antonio Pollaiuolo. They certainly suggest an affinity with the fine chiselling of a goldsmith. The light-toned head, set against a dark ground which blends with the tone of the dress, has a cameo-like prominence. The profile portrait of the Renaissance, inspired by the heads on the coins and gems of classical antiquity, testifies to a new interest in the individual personality.

The picture was in the possession of Alexander Barker, from whence it came into the Cook Collection in Richmond; it was acquired from there in 1946 under the terms of the Felton Bequest

Florentine School
The Adoration of the Magi,
1420–30

In his book On Painting, Leon Battista Alberti said: ‘An admirable and praiseworthy narrative picture will present itself so charming and adorned with pleasant features that it will hold anyone who looks at it, taught or untaught, in delight and emotion.’ Spectators never cease to delight in the order and variety of the Adoration. The bustle of overlapping forms of horses and camels on the left is followed by the separate, distinctly silhouetted figures of the Three Kings and Joseph; the eye travels over the prostrate body of the old King towards the goal of their journey and the close of the composition: the Virgin, framed by the cloth of honour and the shed, is distanced from the rest of the scene by the white and shaded walls of the building on her left. The ordered design, to which the undulating hillside plays an accompaniment, is that of the early Renaissance. Variety is added by the splendour of the costumes and the brilliant colours, which still echo the gay fairytale style of courtly Gothic. The elongated format suggests that the picture once formed part of the predella of a large altarpiece.

The work has belonged to Professor Sellars of Edinburgh, Archibald Anderson, Archibald George Blomefield Russell, Herbert Bier, London, The Schaefer Galleries, New York, and Herbert Bier, London, from whom it was acquired in 1966–67 under the terms of the Felton Bequest.

Florentine School
Eight Famous Men
c. 1450

The page comes from a picture chronicle with illustrations of famous men from the Six Ages of the World, of which, according to medieval historians, history was composed. From left to right, they are: Pyrrhus son of Achilles, Ascanius son of Aeneas, the Prophet Samuel, King Eurythames of Sparta, King Codrus of Athens, King Aletes of Corinth, David, and Absalom. Figures taken from the ‘Fourth Age’ of classical and biblical antiquity, they are, in the customary medieval manner, garbed in the dress of the painter’s own time, yet they have a bodily presence and firmness of stance that distinguishes them from Gothicism. The simple outlines, the shading and colouring, bear a marked resemblance to the work of Piero della Francesca, but it is not known who the artist was. Series of famous men continued to be painted, sculpted and engraved until recent times, but the fantasy element of the sequence here was soon abandoned for greater historical accuracy. Renaissance artists began to rely on actual portrait likenesses for such sequences. The most celebrated portraits of famous men occur in Van Dyck’s Iconography, mainly dating from 1634-35, the ‘Landau-Finaly’ set of which is in the Print Room Collection.

The chronicle came from a French collection and was successively owned by William Morris, Charles Fairfax Murray and Sir Sydney Cockerell. It was broken up and dispersed at the Sotheby sale of 2 July 1958. The page here was acquired in London in 1966 under the terms of the Felton Bequest.

Andrea Mantegna
The Battle of the Sea Gods (right half of a frieze)
early 1470s

In the art of the Middle Ages ancient Greek and Roman gods and demigods had lost their classical proportions; they had also lost physical presence, since the medieval artist did not cultivate the ability to depict vigorous action in an apparently three-dimensional form. In Mantegna’s time, the ancient gods and heroes were restored to the form the artists of classical antiquity had given them. Mantegna is believed to have illustrated here a legend told by the historian Diodorus Siculus about a people of fish-eaters (Ichthyo-phagi); and he has based his figures on Graeco-Roman Nereid sarcophagi and other antique prototypes, which he imitated with such striking success that a fifteenth-century terracotta relief (in the Museo Nazionale in Raven-na), which is based on this engraving, was long regarded as the work from antiquity which had served as Mantegna’s model. The rediscovery of the pagan past not only supplied early Renaissance artists with models of perfect, youthful human form, but allowed the vigorous expression of passions of violence and cruelty without moral censorship.
This engraving was acquired in London in 196s under the terms of the Felton Bequest.

The above text was first published in The National Gallery of Victoria, written by Ursula Hoff and published by Thames and Hudson, London, 1973.