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Lot Essay
The attribution to Domenico Maria Viani was first made, independently, by Daniele Benati and Angelo Mazza, shortly after this copper re-emerged on the art market in 1998. One of the artist's most outstanding works, it is indebted to the Carracci and to Domenico Fetti's treatment of the subject now in the Royal Castle in Prague (E. Safarik, Fetti, Milan, 1990, no. 20). The subject of the Parable of the Tares, drawn from Matthew 13:24-30, is rarely treated in Italian painting. It recounts the story of a landowner whose enemies sow tares (weeds) in the field where grain seeds have already been planted, while the peasants are asleep. When the first shoots appear and the malice is discovered, the wise landowner decides to wait and let the wheat and the weeds grow together, in order to save the wheat to be separated at harvest, rather than burning the whole field and losing his crop. The parable was intended to illustrate God's mercy and the inevitable outcome of the Day of Judgment, when the souls of the virtuous--the wheat--will be separated from those of the wicked--the chaff.
Bridging the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, Viani was amongst the new generation of Bolognese artists (with Giuseppe Maria Crespi and Aurelio Milani) who adapted the classicist legacy of the Carracci to the sensibilities of their time. Benati has noted Viani's conceit of placing foreshortened, muscular bodies in the foreground of a tightly composed picture plane is echoed in both his Supper at Emmaus (Piacenza, Collegio Alberoni) and Christ reproaching the deniers of the Eucharist (Bologna, private collection; see R. Roli, Pittura bolognese 1650-1800: Dal Cignani al Gandolfi, Bologna, 1977, figs. 153b and 154b and R. Roli in D. Benati, ed., Disegni emiliani del Sei-Settecento: Quadri da stanza e da altare, Milan, 1991, p. 233). The delicately applied paint, particularly well-preserved here on to the copper support, with its creamy brushstrokes and detailed naturalistic attention, recalls that in the Jupiter and Ceres painted for Senator Ratta after 1710 (Cesena, Casa di Risparmio), and its replicas (Vienna, Akademie der Bildenden Künste and Christie's, New York, 12 January 1994, lot 5). The composition of the present lot seems to have impressed the young Aurelio Milani, whose Resurrection of Christ (Bologna, Palazzo Arcivescovile; Roli, op. cit., 1977, fig. 205a) uses a similar compositional solution, but in Milani's unique handling. Benati has noted that comparison with that work suggests for the present picture a dating circa 1710.
Bridging the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, Viani was amongst the new generation of Bolognese artists (with Giuseppe Maria Crespi and Aurelio Milani) who adapted the classicist legacy of the Carracci to the sensibilities of their time. Benati has noted Viani's conceit of placing foreshortened, muscular bodies in the foreground of a tightly composed picture plane is echoed in both his Supper at Emmaus (Piacenza, Collegio Alberoni) and Christ reproaching the deniers of the Eucharist (Bologna, private collection; see R. Roli, Pittura bolognese 1650-1800: Dal Cignani al Gandolfi, Bologna, 1977, figs. 153b and 154b and R. Roli in D. Benati, ed., Disegni emiliani del Sei-Settecento: Quadri da stanza e da altare, Milan, 1991, p. 233). The delicately applied paint, particularly well-preserved here on to the copper support, with its creamy brushstrokes and detailed naturalistic attention, recalls that in the Jupiter and Ceres painted for Senator Ratta after 1710 (Cesena, Casa di Risparmio), and its replicas (Vienna, Akademie der Bildenden Künste and Christie's, New York, 12 January 1994, lot 5). The composition of the present lot seems to have impressed the young Aurelio Milani, whose Resurrection of Christ (Bologna, Palazzo Arcivescovile; Roli, op. cit., 1977, fig. 205a) uses a similar compositional solution, but in Milani's unique handling. Benati has noted that comparison with that work suggests for the present picture a dating circa 1710.