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Description: | unframed CRE CASALI, Andrea; (Italian; 1705-1784) ATTRI GIORDANO, Luca; (Italian; 1632-1705) This classicising work is one of the largest paintings in the collection of the founder, Dr Hunter, and one of four works he owned by living Italian artists who worked in London. Danaë was a mortal woman, the daughter of Acrisius of Argos, with whom Zeus fell in love. Acrisius kept her locked in a tower because of a prediction that she would bear a child who would kill him. Zeus visited her in a shower of gold, and she gave birth to Perseus (Ovid, Metamorphoses, IV). Casali's model for the composition was Correggio's Danaë in Rome (Borghese Gallery), in reverse, but with the same stormy atmosphere. Its relationship to a slightly smaller painting on the Paris art market in 2004 suggests that the subject was one treated earlier by Casali in France, before arriving in England in the early 1740s. Hunter would have had various opportunities of getting to know Casali, who maintained a workshop in Gerrard Street in Soho. Casali painted an altarpiece for Hogarth for the chapel of Captain Coram's Foundling Hospital (1748-50), and his rising reputation with the aristocracy brought him fashionable portrait commissions, including Wilhelm IV of Nassau. He was particularly successful in obtaining commissions for decorative paintings. These included paintings for Syon House, for the Duke of Northumberland, whom Hunter knew through membership of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, of which the Duke was President. Casali won premiums from the Society in 1760, 1761, 1762 and 1766, and exhibited with the Society of Artists from 1760 to 1778. He was criticised for the predictability of his figures by a critic who wrote 'I do not mean to reflect on Signor Casali, - I love Artists of every Nation, and modern artists too; why not? And I should have liked him better, if I had only seen one of his pieces, - any one of them - for they are all alike, indeed they are, Gunhilda, Lucretia, and Cleopatra, just alike?.' On the other hand, his prize-winning 'Lucrece in Claro Oscuro' exhibited in 1766 was said to have 'discovered sufficient Testimonies of an exalted Genius.' In Glasgow from 1807, the painting was implausibly ennobled with an attribution to Giordano, then neglected until it was conserved in 1994. Alistair Laing proposed the attribution to Casali in 2000. | License: | http://www.hmag.gla.ac.uk/spirit/rights/ | Publisher: | Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow | Rights holder: | Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow | Subjects: | GREEK MYTHOLOGY : OVID METAMORPHOSES : EROTIC SUBJECT : FRESCO PAINTER : DANAE : JUPITER : ZEUS : PUTTO : HUNTER 2007 : | Source: | Hunterian Museum | Creator: | Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow | Identifier: | http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/cgi-bin/... | Language: | en-GB | Go to resource |
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