Love Scene (Romano Painting)

"Love Scene" - a painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Giulio Romano from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum .

Julio Romano

"Love Scene" . 1524-1525

ital Due amanti

canvas (translated from wood), oil. 163 × 337 cm

State Hermitage , St. Petersburg

( inv. GE-223 )

The picture depicts nude lovers hugging on a bed, followed by an elderly female servant watching through an open door. The bed is decorated with two small bas-reliefs of a frankly pornographic nature: on the left is a satyr copulating with a goat, on the right - a satyr copulating with a woman.

The work dates back to 1524–1525, and the place of its creation is unknown, since in 1524 Romano left Rome , and the following year came to Mantua , where he worked on large orders. The cat that hides under the bed of lovers Giulio Romano is also depicted in the painting “Madonna with a Cat” ( Capodimonte Museum ), created in 1522–1523, that is, even when the artist was in Rome.

Giulio Romano. "Madonna with a cat." Capodimonte Museum , Naples

The painting was bought by Catherine II in London with T. Jenkins with the mediation of I. F. Reifenstein. In a letter dated September 8, 1780, addressed to T. Pete, Hamilton reported that Jenkins had sold many works to the Russian empress. “Giulio Romano, I believe, is the best in the collection” ^[1] .

Initially, the work was written on wood, but in 1834 A. Mitrokhin was transferred to canvas . Since the picture was not exposed until the beginning of the 1920s, and its storage was carried out carelessly, it has significant damage: for example, there were three major breakthroughs on the transfer canvas, embedded on the reverse side with coarse patches, the paint layer was also damaged in some places as before Mitrokhin, and after it ^[2] .

The picture is tentatively called “Love Scene”, since there are several different versions about its plot. Thus, in the Hermitage catalog of 1773, the picture is listed as “The Gallant Scene”, E. C. Lipgart called it “Plot from Boccaccio” ^[3] , during the restoration of the painting in the first half of the XIX century, it passed as “Mars and Venus” ^{[4 ]} , in the 1958 Hermitage catalog is listed as “Alexander and Roxana”, and Neverov interprets the plot as “Zeus and Alkymen” ^[5] . Hart believes that the picture shows a maid warning her unfaithful wife about her husband's return ^[6] . Thornton put forward the version that the picture depicts a courtesan accepting a client ^[7] .

Under the provisional title “Love Scene”, the picture was first shown to the general public at the First Hermitage Exhibition of 1920, in the exhibition catalog it was said: ““ Love Scene ”by Giulio Romano ... the very picture that, according to Vasari , was owned by Prince Vespasian Gonzaga (from the Hermitage’s storerooms; repetition or copy in the Berlin Museum) ”. Lipgart (Cat. Lipgart) also believed that "perhaps our picture is the same one that Vasari mentions." The aforementioned repetition or copy from the Berlin Museum differed from the Hermitage picture in that the figures on it were somewhat moved from the foreground to the depth of the picture; in 1930, this work was transferred to the palace of Sanssouci , and in 1942 it was located in the castle of Reinsberg and is considered dead during the Second World War ^[8] . The testimony of Giorgio Vasari was published by Milanese in 1880, and Milanese considered that it belonged to the Berlin picture, since he himself could not see the Hermitage canvas, which was not included in the Hermitage catalogs in the 19th century and was stored separately “because of the immoderateness of the plot” ^{[9 ]} .

Currently, the picture is exhibited in the Grand (Old) Hermitage Museum in room 216 ^[10] .