Allegory of Earthly Love

Manner of Busi Giovanni called Cariani

(Fuipiano al Brembo c. 1480 - Venice 1547)

While in the past this canvas was ascribed to Giorgione and Titian, today critics attribute it to the manner of Giovanni Busi, the painter from Bergamo who was active in Venice from the end of the first decade of the 16th century. Often interpreted as a scene of seduction, the subject more precisely represents an allegory of earthly love or voluptuousness. It in fact depicts an attractive young woman who is at the centre of attention of a pair of elegantly dressed young men. Symbolising the ephemeral nature of the passions, an elderly man standing behind her silently observes the gesture of the two youths.

Object details

Commentary

‘A work on canvas roughly three spans high with four figures, three men and a woman, no. 355, with a gilded frame, by Giorgioni’ (Inv. 1693): so reads the description of this painting of unknown provenance in the 1693 inventory of the Borghese Collection. On that occasion it was listed as a work by Giorgione; yet the 1790 inventory ascribed it to Titian and the 1833 Inventario Fidecommissario to the ‘school of Titian’.

In 1893, Adolfo Venturi located the work in the artistic circles of Ferrara, suggesting a specific attribution to Dosso Dossi. For his part, Bernard Berenson (1899) rejected this idea in favour of Giovanni Busi of Bergamo, called Cariani. Subsequently, his view was accepted by Bernardini (1910), albeit with reservations, and unhesitatingly by Troche (1934) and Gallina (1954).

Roberto Longhi (1928), however, thought differently: in his view, the canvas derived from a prototype by Titian executed in roughly 1520. Paola della Pergola (1955), meanwhile, leaned toward an attribution to Giorgione, thus calling Berenson’s theory into question. Rodolfo Pallucchini (1966; 1983) likewise did not accept the name of Busi, arguing that the only characteristic of the work in question reflecting the style of the painter from Bergamo was the reddish colouring of the flesh; yet this one detail, he contended, did not suffice to uphold that attribution.

In the context of these uncertainties regarding the painter of this work, we must limit ourselves to proposing that the artist was among those active in Venice in the 1520s. The subject of canvas certainly points in this direction, as the theme approaches those dear to the circle of Giorgione, half-way between a ‘Susanna and the Elders’ and an allegorical composition.

Antonio Iommelli