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Sebastiano Ricci (Belluno 1659-Venice 1734)

The Sacrifice of Polyxena c. 1726-30

Oil on canvas | 77.0 x 66.4 cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external) | RCIN 404763

Queen's Drawing Room, Kew Palace

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  • Polyxena, daughter of King Priam and Hecuba of Troy, is loved by the Greek hero Achilles. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid describes how the shadow of Achilles appears after the fall of Troy and demands the sacrifice on his tomb of Polyxena. Faced by Achilles's son Neoptolemus brandishing a sword, Polyxena courageously bares her breast to meet her fate, as shown here. In Ovid's Metamorphoses (xiii, 440-80), it is the priest who kills her, 'weeping and remorseful', represented here by the aged man holding her head to her right. On the left of Sebastiano's painting is the equestrian statue of Achilles, his ghost seated on clouds above Polyxena. Various figures, including a soldier and a page, look on. The features of the stout man standing behind the priest, although only summarily indicated, resemble Ricci's own.

    The painting is a modello for a larger painting that was perhaps never executed. Sebastiano imaginatively explored ideas for the story in five preparatory drawings that play with individual figures and possible compositions, four of which are in the Royal Collection. A painting by Ricci of the same subject, almost certainly on a smaller scale, was recorded in the collection of Stanislas Poniatowski, King of Poland, in 1795, which is now presumed lost. The subject was popular in eighteenth-century Venetian painting. In the late 1720s and 1730s Giambattista Pittoni, who must have known Sebastiano's work, painted the subject several times in a much lighter, less tragic vein.

    The composition and some of the figures are indebted to Pietra da Cortona's The Sacrifice of Polyxena of c.1623-4 (Musei Capitolini, Rome), while the positions of Polyxena and Neoptolemus and others echo those in Veronese's Martyrdom of St Giustina of 1574-5 (Santa Giustina, Padua). The painting has been variously dated between c.1400 and 1730, but the thick impasto and thin, energetic and broken brushwork, as well as the broken, nervous penwork in the drawings, are more symptomatic of Sebastiano's work of the late 1720s.

    Text adapted from Canaletto & the Art of Venice, 2017.
    Provenance

    Acquired in 1762 by George III from Joseph Smith, British Consul in Venice (Italian List no 52); recorded in Princess Amelia's Bedroom at Kew in 1805

  • Medium and techniques

    Oil on canvas

    Measurements

    77.0 x 66.4 cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external)

    91.0 x 80.7 x 5.0 cm (frame, external)


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