Gaetano GANDOLFI

In the last few years of his career, Gaetano Gandolfi produced a number of large, highly finished black chalk drawings of religious, classical and mythological subjects. These are all of approximately the same size and are often dated on the verso with dates between the late 1790s to 1802, the year of the artist’s death. The present sheet is a fine and characteristic example of this group of late drawings which, although occasionally related to small easel pictures, may well have been intended as independent works in their own right. Indeed, no painting related to this allegorical drawing is known. The subject of the present sheet, which is relatively uncommon in 18th century Italian art, is the blindfolded Fortuna, Roman goddess of luck and fate, spinning the wheel of Fortune (Rota Fortunae), symbolic of the capricious nature of destiny. She holds a cornucopia, from which she showers gifts indiscriminately on humankind, and balances on a globe, indicative of the fickleness of worldly success. 

The Gandolfi scholar Donatella Biagi Maino has kindly confirmed the authenticity of this drawing and has dated it to the very end of the 18th century. She further likens this finished drawing to one of Time Unveiling Truth by Gaetano Gandolfi in the collection of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. Among other stylistically comparable drawings by the artist are a Venus and Adonis, dated 1799, in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, and an equally finished drawing of Orpheus and Eurydice, signed and dated 1802, in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C..

This drawing was formerly in the collection of paintings and drawings assembled by the noted Swiss painter and illustrator Émile François Chambon (1905-1993), much of which was dispersed after his death. Chambon also collected African and Oceanic art, which he bequeathed to the Musée d’Ethnographie in Geneva.