The Picture: Domenico Guidobono’s large painting features a pallid and beautiful semi-nude woman, covered with a sweeping red drapery, accompanied by a young child in a contemporary dress laced up the back. The girl gazes out at the viewer and points toward the woman, who rests on a large blue pillow, holding a pair of dividers and an open tome of diagrams. The two figures are surrounded by various animals, real and fictive: an attentive spaniel that gazes up toward a monstrous hybrid creature with outspread wings, a gray tabby cat, a coati (a member of the raccoon family), a vampire bat, and a dead duck that hangs over a stack of books that rest atop two skulls. Bookending a composition that is completely filled with a disorienting assortment of humans and animals are an ornate metal ewer on the left, and on the right, a golden brazier smoking with burning embers.
Paintings involving magic and sorceresses were popular in baroque Genoa, inspired by the publication of Torquato Tasso’s
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), an epic poem that featured the beguiling witch Armida, as well as the lush paintings of the exoticized Circe by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione from the 1650s.[1] While the painting has been given a variety of titles, none captures the essential fact that this is a scene of magic with a beautifully enchanting witch.
Bertina Suida Manning (1984) has interpreted the painting as a synthesis of sorcery,
vanitas, and melancholia, with the central witch as a personification of art and the child as the human soul. Both she and Ann Percy have interpreted the painting as an allegory, owing to its relationship with Castiglione’s etchings of
Melancholia (
17.50.17-44) and
Circe (
17.50.17-53). Throughout the seventeenth century, debates over the veracity of witchcraft described female witches as delusional and suffering from melancholy. Whereas Castiglione always depicted the introspective, hand-to-head pose of melancholy, the woman in Guidobono’s painting has neither the physical nor allegorical attributes of that temperament. Her elegant refinement is arresting and active. Her pale skin is suggestively swathed in voluminous fabrics, with glazes of white to create transparent layers over her chest, and the delicate features of her rosy face are framed by coiffed hair adorned with a silk bow and pearls. Her bright white arm reaches across her body to point to her ancient book, propped up on a horse’s skull (taken from Castiglione’s
Diogenes,
1973.500.1). Furthermore, the still-life elements around her, while found in imagery of melancholia and
vanitas, are also common to witchcraft images. The brazier, in particular, painted with textured sfumato to create a smoldering effect, with a vampire bat hovering above, is like those used in witches’ rites. Thus, it seems more likely that the subject is a scene of witchcraft, paired with the
vanitas and melancholic associations of witches.
The variety of animals present is not only painted with a mesmerizing verisimilitude—each with its own textured fur, feathers, wings, and claws—but also suggests the type of witch depicted; all have negative connotations. The iconographer Cesare Ripa identified the dog and cat with animosity and the bat with ignorance. The coati, native to South America, was known for its unfriendly character. Its appearance in Guidobono’s picture is unique in early modern art, and it is likely that the artist studied the grubby, hissing mammal in a private zoo in Genoa.[2] The hybrid has often been identified as a chimera, a monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail, or as the half-eagle, half-lion griffin, both of which Ripa identified as symbols of vice. However, the monster could also be a hippogriff, the magical creature described in Ludovico Ariosto’s epic
Orlando furioso (1516, revised 1521 and 1532). Ariosto describes it as “the offspring of a griffin and a mare, / its plumage, forefeet, muzzle, wings and head / like those of its paternal parent were.”[3] The mythical beast conjures associations with magic, since it had been trained by the sorcerer Atalante and ridden by Ariosto’s hero Ruggiero to the island of the witch Alcina. Guidobono’s careful attention to rendering the hippogriff with naturalistic accuracy recalls Ariosto’s own description: “on earth and in the air—no magic creature, / but real and true a prodigy of Nature.”[4]
Charles Dempsey (1973) proposed that the witch could potentially be identified as Melissa, Ariosto’s “good witch” who helps Bradamante save Ruggiero, and that the animal is a hippogriff. However, he did not identify a specific episode from
Orlando furioso the painting could represent. It is more likely that the witch is, in fact, Alcina, the sorceress who ensnares male lovers on her island and turns them into inanimate objects and animals when she tires of them. Her sinister nature is implied by the surrounding symbols of death and decay, but even the skeptical viewer, like Ruggiero, can still fall prey to her captivating beauty. Of course, the child throws the narrative into question. Even if the picture does not represent a specific moment from Ariosto’s epic, the child serves to draw the learned viewer’s attention to the dangerous beauty of Alcina; the hippogriff seems to have just deposited the viewer on her island. Alternatively, the presence of the child relates to the deep fear of the power of witches to contaminate those around them, even children, by enlisting them to aid in their nefarious rites.
The Attribution: The painting was originally attributed to Bartolomeo Guidobono, Domenico’s older brother, by Bertina Suida Manning and Robert Manning in unpublished manuscripts of the 1970s, until the painting was rightly given to Domenico by Mary Newcome Schleier in 1981 (see Refs.). Both brothers produced pictures of witches. For example, there is a
stregoneria (scene of witchcraft) by Domenico in the Galleria Nazionale, Parma, and two versions recently identified as
Medea Rejuvenating Aeson (Cantor Museum, Stanford University and private collection).[5] The similarities between the brothers, with respect to both their taste in subjects and painting style, is exemplified in the recent reattribution of the Cantor picture from Domenico to Bartolomeo. The attention to anatomy and use of chiaroscuro to model Medea’s body, however, demonstrates a different approach to the body than the ivory paleness and rounded, abstracted sweetness of the central female in The Met’s painting, distinguishing the eighteenth-century taste for refinement and the character of Domenico’s hand.
The linchpin to understanding the picture as a
stregoneria and as by the younger Guidobono is a surviving document from the dowry of Maria Beatrice, Domenico's daughter, for her 1720 marriage to Bartolomeo Boccardo in Turin. The dowry included a sum of money along with pictures, including “due quadri grandi uno d’una Maga con sua figlia et Animali, et Altro d’una Diana con un sattiro et Animali, originali tutti e due del Sig. Domenico” (two large paintings, one of a witch with her daughter and animals, the other is one of Diana with a satyr and animals, both are originals by Signor Domenico).[6] The Diana has been identified with a painting in a private collection,[7] and Mary Newcome Schleier identified the
Witch with Her Daughter as The Met’s painting. Thus the painting can be attributed confidently to Domenico, created between about 1710 and 1720, when he developed a more independent style after the death of his brother in 1709.
Hannah Segrave 2019
[1] Manning 1984, p. 689.
[2] Manning 1984, p. 706.
[3] Ludovico Ariosto,
Orlando furioso, Ferrara, 1532, canto IV, stanza XVIII.
[4] Ariosto 1532, canto IV, stanza XIX.
[5] See Newcome 2011 and Spione 2012, p. 56.
[6] Published in Newcome-Schleier 2002, p. 181.
[7] Spione 2012, p. 72.
