Portrait of a Lady, probably the Artist’s Daughter, Faustina Maratti Zappi (ca. 1679-1745), as Saint Margaret
Provenance
(Possibly) Henry Ellison (d. 1795), Gateshead Park Durham by 1764; by descent to his nephew
(Possibly) Rev. Thomas Ellison (1780–1827), Killamery, Ireland; by descent to his son
John William Ellison-Macartney (d. 1904), Clogher Palace, Clogher, County Tyrone, Ireland; by descent in the family
Alexandre Wakhevitch, Madresfield Court, England, by 1990
with Hall & Knight, New York, 1998
Private Collection, Houston
Exhibited
New York, Nicholas Hall, Paintings by Carlo Maratti, 2017
Bibliography
Stella Rudolph, in Nicholas Hall, Paintings by Carlo Marrati, New York, 2017, exh. cat., pp. 36-39, reproduced pp. 37, 39.
Alessandro Agresti in Yuri Primarosa, ed., Una Rivoluzione Silenziosa. Plautilla Bricci, Pittrice e Architettrici, Rome, 2021, exh. cat., pp. 224-25, under no. I.4
Alessandro Agresti, Carlo Maratti (1625-1713). Eredità ed Evoluzioni del Classicismo Romano, Rome, 2022, pp. 67-68, reproduced fig. 49.
Stella Rudolph and Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Carlo Maratti (1625–1713), tra la magnificenza del Barocco e il sogno d’Arcadia, Dipinti e disegni, Rome, 2024, pp. 920-21, reproduced no. 200.
Essay
Dated by Dr. Stella Rudolph and Simonetta Prosperi to ca.1694–95, this engaging portrait was produced at the height of Carlo Maratti’s career. Following the death of his master, Andrea Sacchi, in 1661, Maratti had established the most renowned studio in Rome and, with the death of Bernini in 1680, he became the city’s foremost artist. It was at about this time that the artist painted a series of six of the most eminent women of antiquity for one of his principal collectors, Francesco Montioni. Of this series, Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl is now in the Museo Nazionale, Rome (fig. 1). Although Maratti concentrated primarily on religious and history painting, he was also a distinguished portraitist.
The present work is thought to be of Faustina Maratti Zappi (1679–1745), the artist’s illegitimate daughter with Francesca Gommi, his long-time mistress who he famously portrayed as an art collector (Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, 2018.1; fig. 2). Faustina was a considerable personage in her own right. Having received an exceptional education in the liberal arts, Faustina entered the prestigious Accademia dell’Arcadia in 1704 where she acquired the name ‘Aglauro Cidonia’, derived from founding Athenian princess. Together with her husband Giambattista Felice Zappi, a lawyer from Imola as well as a poet, Faustina published a collection of Petrarchan sonnets in 1723. She became celebrated in Roman artistic circles as the most accomplished female poet of her age, and her residence in Rome became the hotspot for chamber music and literary gatherings, frequented by Georg Friedrich Händel and Domenico Scarlatti among others. She was deemed a great beauty, attracting the attention of Giangiorgio Sforza Cesarini, a cadet son of the Duke of Genzano, whose attempted kidnapping of her saw him exiled to Naples, then Spain. Her birth was legitimized by Papal Bull in 1698.
Rudolph and Prosperi remark on the resemblance between the present work and Maratti’s portrait of Faustina Holding a Painter’s Palette in the Palazzo Corsini, Rome (Gallerie Nazionali d’Arte Antica di Roma, inv. no. 220; fig. 3). Executed circa 1698, when his daughter would have been approximately 19 years old, the sitter exhibits the same distinctive features as appear in the present work. And yet, she is demonstrably older in the Palazzo Corsini picture, lacking the roundness and adolescent quality of the earlier work. This accords with Stella Rudolph’s suggested dating for the picture to circa. 1694–95, as Faustina would have been 15 or 16 and is here clearly already beginning to transform into a young adult. The capacious folds of the drapery, the unusually large, lustrous eyes, and the curved position of the tapering fingers are characteristic of Maratti’s portraits of this period as is the somber tonality of the costume, which emphasizes the paleness of the girl’s complexion.
This portrait was probably acquired in the second half of the 18th-century by Henry Ellison of Gateshead Park, Durham who sat to Pompeo Batoni in 1764 (Private Collection; Clark/Bowron 267). Then it was likely transferred his younger son Thomas Ellison who went to Ireland and settled in the North-West part of the country. By 1890, Clogher Palace (County Tyrone, Northern Ireland; fig. 2) was the seat of John William Ellison-Macartney (s. Thomas Ellison), where this work is documented. John William assumed by Royal License the additional surname and arms of Macartney on the death of his maternal uncle, the Rev. W. G. Macartney.