The coming Classic Week at the Dorotheum in Vienna will focus on art treasures from bygone times. From the 8th to the 10th of November, works by Old Masters and paintings from the 19th century will be presented in two live auctions and one online auction.
The work The Triumph of the Consul Lucius Aemilius Paulus, executed in tempera and gold on wood by the Florentine Renaissance painter Apollonio di Giovanni, is part of the highlights of the Old Masters I auction, which will take place on November 9. The work comes with the highest estimate of all lots. The 39.5 x 155.7 cm work was originally part of a cassone, a wooden chest that was popular as a dowry chest from the 14th to the 17th century, especially in Florence. Apollonio di Giovanni was a specialist in painting these chests, which were usually adorned with mythological, religious, and literary scenes. Depictions of triumphal processions, as in this case, were particularly popular, presumably because the cassoni were also carried in a ceremonial procession to the newlyweds' house.
Another highlight of the offer comes from the Lombardy-born painter Ambrosius Benson, who spent most of his life in Bruges, where he was a member of the painters' guild and ran his own workshop. Dorotheum will present a portrait of Mary Magdalene that showcases Benson at the height of his creativity, around 1530.
The depiction of Saint Magdalene figures repeatedly in Benson's oeuvre, divided into two groups: the Magdalene reading and the Magdalene opening a golden perfume jar. The present painting belongs to the second group and shows the saint as a seductress, dressed in the sumptuous robes of the Dutch elite of the time.
The following painting of the Roman sea god Neptune, executed by the Italian Baroque painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, also deserves a mention among the Old Master paintings.
Barbieri, nicknamed Il Guercino ('the Squint') shows the ruler of the seas as an old man who has not lost his strength, and is about to attack one of his 'subjects' with his trident. The painting probably comes from Guercino's late work around 1650 and was probably executed by him in collaboration with his nephew and assistant Benedetto Gennari.
The live auction with works by Old Masters will be supplemented on November 10 by the online auction Old Masters II. The almost 200 lots in the 19th Century Paintings catalogue will go under the hammer at Dorotheum on November 8. Highlights here include three works for which their creators traveled to the shores of Italy.
A notable mention goes to a portrait that the painter Giuseppe Tominz, who was popular in Trieste, depicted of the local shipping agent Paolo Preinitsch. The portrait shows Preinitsch, who is probably around 60 years old, in a pose that expresses youthfulness but also self-confidence. It is not without reason that Preinitsch was given the nickname Napoleone delle Strade ('Napoleon of the streets'). While the foreground of the painting is dominated by the sitter, the background shows the port of Trieste and the winding uphill streets with horse-drawn carriages, which can be interpreted as an allusion to Paolo Preinitsch's enterprise.
Far more romantic is Carl Gustav Carus' painting Italian Fishermen in the Port of Naples from 1828-29. Carus, who was a renowned doctor, had been interested in painting since his youth. He was acquainted with both Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Caspar David Friedrich, the latter having a great influence on Carus' artistic work.
Seventy years later, the Austrian landscape painter Alfred Zoff, who, like Carl Gustav Carus, had studied medicine, painted the coast lapped by waves near Boccadasse, which is now a district of Genoa. Zoff, who was trained in Vienna, initially painted in the style of Realism, but after a stay at the Grand Ducal Art School in Karlsruhe, he gradually gave it up in favor of a looser style of painting influenced by Impressionism. From the late 1870s, seascapes also became his preferred subject. Both developments are reflected in the present work.
The Classic Week will take place from November 8-10 in the Palais Dorotheum, Dorotheergasse 17, in Vienna. The exhibition will be open there from the 22nd of October.