Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

drawings also by Cades from the same collection.
From that date, all trace of the Vestals picture, was lost
and it was no longer mentioned in any of the sources.
Perhaps the canvas was sold at the time or given away
by the Baron to someone in the region. Dating from
three years later, 1792, another catalogue testifies to
the change in situation of the pictures as they now
appear on the art market in Paris. In an anonymous sale
catalogue, dated 8 May 1792, published by the dealer
Le Brun, the Puymaurin paintings figure amongst ‘a
number of paintings by old masters of three schools.
To whit: Raphael, Subleyras, Gamelin, Denys and
others [..]. All coming from a provincial collection’.
The paintings in question were described under lots 7
and 8: the description of lot 8 records the following:
Cades. Two paintings, pendants: Cornelia Mother
of the Gracchi presenting her two young Children
to a Campanian Woman with the words, Here are
my jewels; a composition of five figures, height: 22
pouces, width 25. The other representing a Sacrifice,
2. Giuseppe Cades, Bradamante falls in the precipice, Palazzo
Chigi, Ariccia.
composition of a few figures 2 . The Sacrifice seems to
have substituted Maximus amongst the Vestals as the
fourth element of the two pairs of pendants. As already
happened in Toulouse in 1789, after the exhibition at
the Academy of Fine Art, following the Paris sale, three
of the Puymaurin paintings returned into the family
collection, but all trace of the Sacrifice disappeared;
it seems most probable that the picture was sold on
that occasion. As knowledge stands, the identification
of this present canvas with the Sacrifice belonging to
the ‘amateur de province’ must remain hypothetical,
but as far as the style and the construction of the
composition are concerned, the canvas is certainly
close to Cades’s work in the period of the Puymaurin
pictures, even if one cannot exclude that it might be
slightly later. A very striking element of the scene is
the characteristic position of the left leg of the male
figure, with the knee and the foot foreshortened and
extended in the direction of the onlooker. This detail
is represented in an extremely similar, if not identical,
way in a drawing in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier,
of Achilles and Briseis (fig.1) of 1776 and in a drawing
in the Louvre of 1774, which shows (probably for the
first time) the composition of Achilles and Patroclus in
the Tent, surprised by the followers of Agamemnon 3 .
Common to all the paintings and drawings of these
years is also the uncertain balance of the principal
figure, inspired by Roman and Emilian compositions
of the Mannerist period.
The subject of our painting is not, as in the other
Puymaurin paintings, an episode from Antiquity
with a moralistic or melodramatic tone, but rather a
moment of pure physicality and sensuality. Two lovers,
embracing in the shade of a garden, make a sacrifice to
a herm of Pan, the God of pastoral lovers, incarnation
of living nature and of elemental qualities of the senses
and of human hearts. The painter sets the scene in a
wooded clearing, painted with gusto: verdant foliage
and gnarled branches entwined with vines seem to
emulate the embraces of the couple. Placed at the
centre, in the foreground, the woman, with naked
shoulders and a knee resting on the ground, is posed
like one of Michelangelo’s sibyls, with the steadfast
presence of an architectural element. It is she who
supports her companion while he makes sacrifice
to Pan with a momentum that unbalances his pose,
giving it that precarious equilibrium so characteristic
of Cades’s protagonists who are often carried away
by sentiment or passion. The palette underlines the
sensuality unleashed in the painting. The vibrant
garland of flowers balanced on the curling ringlets of
the man, the iridescent green drapery of the woman,
these echo the colours of the natural elements that
encircle the pair; and it is here that we see most
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