Psyche Carried to Olympus

Attributed to Noort Lambert van

(Amersfoort c. 1520 - Antwerp 1571)

This painting depicts Psyche ascending to Olympus accompanied by three cherubs. The subject derives from the scene frescoed by Raphael and his collaborators on one of the pendentives in the loggia named after the Greek goddess in the Villa Farnesina in Rome. The background landscape takes its cue from an engraving by Beatrizet from roughly 1545; it forms part of an iconographic tradition that places Psyche and her three attendants in a natural setting. First mentioned in connection with the Borghese Collection in 1693, the panel was once ascribed to Battista Dossi of Ferrara; yet critics later changed the attribution to the Flemish painter Lambert Van Noort on stylistic grounds.

Object details

Commentary

The first mention of the work in connection with the Borghese Collection dates to 1693: the inventory of that year indeed contains an entry for a ‘painting on panel of 4 spans with the figure of a woman with a vessel in her hand, raised by two angels [...] by Raphael of Urbino’. The next inventory, that of 1790, identified the painting as a copy after Raphael; yet it erroneously described the protagonist as ‘Venus supported by two cherubs’ and ascribed the work to ‘Muratori’. The Inventario Fidecommissario of 1833, meanwhile, listed it as a ‘Rape, by Raffaelle Vanni’. Piancastelli (1891, p. 274) gave the same name to the work, changing the attribution to Giovanni da Udine, a hypothesis that had been suggested to him by Morelli in an oral conversation. It was Venturi (1893, p. 115) who correctly identified the panel as deriving from the subject frescoed by Raphael and his collaborators on one of the pendentives of the Psyche Loggia in Villa Farnesina in Rome. Venturi was also the first critic to connect the work to the school of Ferrara, proposing the name of Battista Dossi. While this attribution was accepted by a number of later scholars (Gruyer 1897, p. 286; Gardner 1911, p. 234; Della Pergola 1955, p. 17, n. 7), Longhi (1928, p. 196) revived Morelli’s opinion, suggesting a follower of Raphael close to Giovanni da Udine.

Only in the last decade of the 20th century did Dacos (1995, p. 28) show that the artist of the panel in question was the Flemish painter Lambert Van Noort, a theory which critics have since generally accepted. Davos based her opinion on numerous stylistic similarities with the Madonna of the Girdle, a work signed by the artist, which is held today in the oratory of Santissima Annunziata in Ferrara (formerly the church of Santa Maria di Mortara). Several details, such as his Latinised signature (‘LAMBERTUS NORTENSIS FACEBAT’) and the curved shape of the altarpiece, suggest that Van Noort executed the work during his stay in Italy, which certainly ended by 1549, the year he is documented as being in Antwerp. Similarities in several compositional details in the two paintings, such as resemblance of the angel on the Madonna’s left to the cherub raising Psyche on her right, as well as the likenesses of the female faces generally, point to a close connection between the two works and suggest their chronological proximity. Both works may have painted in Ferrara, the city for which the Madonna was intended, before Van Noort left Italy (Dacos 1980, pp. 175-176; 1995, p. 28; Miarelli Mariani 1996, p. 184; Mastrofini 2012, pp. 203-205).

Accepting Dacos’s attribution, Herrmann Fiore (2002, pp. 128-129) pointed out that the traditional view that the artist in question was Battista Dossi – the hypothesis originally put forth by Venturi and later supported by a number of critics – provides significant evidence for the lively intercourse between the schools of northern Europe and Ferrara in landscape painting. Nonetheless, this scholar underscored that the meticulous attention to the rendering of individual naturalistic details in our panel clearly indicates its connection with northern pictorial culture.

Another clue for aiding scholars in dating the Borghese panel is provided by an engraving by Beatrizet, which is the mirror image of the work in question. Executed in roughly 1545, the engraving was the source of Van Noort’s painting, according to Ilaria Miarelli Mariani (1996, p. 182). Beatrizet’s work further attests to an iconographic tradition that takes the Psyche and her attendants from the fresco in Villa Farnesina and places them in a natural setting (on the engraving, see S. Massari, S. Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Tra mito e allegoria. Immagini a stampa nel ‘500 e ‘600, Rome 1989, pp. 248-249, n. 95). The two works indeed construct the background in the same way, incorporating similar elements, such as the tree trunk and the classical landscape at the two extremes of the respective scenes.

The connection between the engraving and the panel explains the originality of the compositional arrangement of the latter: while deriving from Raphael’s fresco, the panel is a very different work. The presence of the natural terrain below the figures, the rendering of the cloud-filled sky tending toward the colour of green rather than of uniform light blue in the original, and the use of brighter colours convey the group of figures into a different atmosphere, half way between the natural and the divine (Miarelli 1996, p. 182; see also Herrmann Fiore, 2002).

The date of the engraving – roughly 1545 – and the year of the artist’s return to Flanders – 1549 – establish the possible chronological range for the execution of the painting.

Pier Ludovico Puddu

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