A fine and rare Flemish tapestry, LIONESS IN THE RIVER, 1611-1614signed Jan I Raes (the Elder) 1574 -1651 on the right selvedge
£15,000 - £20,000
Looking for a similar item?
Our Home and Interiors specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialistA fine and rare Flemish tapestry, LIONESS IN THE RIVER, 1611-1614
the main field shows an exotic scene as a lioness as she crosses a realistically depicted river within an intricate landscape, the river is framed by plants and trees including a date palm and an oak, other animals depicted are parrots, herons, ducks and a leopard, in the foreground one snake is drinking, another is shedding its skin and an eel can be seen by the water, the impressive border is decorated with golden foliate scrolls on a red ground including poemgranates and artichokes, heads of Bacchic figures and lions can be seen in the corners,
480cm x 442cm
Footnotes
Provenance
Part of a series that had belonged to Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto, Prince Michele Peretti Montalto, Cardinal Francesco Peretti Montalto and to Paolo Savelli in Rome. Most recently the work was part of a collection of a noble Roman noble family and thence by descent.
A Papal Commission
The present lot is part of series of Landscapes with Animals woven by one of the best known early seventeenth-century weavers in Brussels, Jan Raes the Elder (Brussels, 1574-1651) for the nephew of Pope Sixtus V, Vice-Chancellor of the Church (for Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto (1571-1623).
Fortunately, there is a wealth of documentation about this specific series, in particular some letters from the apostolic nuncios to the cardinals in Rome. Guido Bentivoglio, signed the contract with Raes for the actual production of the series in Brussels on 17 December 1611. On 19 July 1614 the set was finished and sent to Rome "a parament of two rooms of new tapestries, not yet displayed with forest verdures and animals drawn from nature."
Origins in Antiquity
Pliny the Elder wrote in the Physiologus that the lioness washes herself in water after mating with a leopard and the serpent drinks and squeezes through a crack in a tree to shed its skin. Many have argued that this iconography serves as a metaphor of the purification needed to attain eternal salvation.
The Series
The cartoons for this series were probably executed by Jean Tons II, a Flemish artist who specialized in zoological subject matter. Of the twelve cartoons, Montalto commission Raes to make eleven. We even know this exact sizes because these were detailed in a letter written in 1617, from the nuncio Ascanio Gesualdi to cardinal Scipione Borghese (Montalto's friend who had wanted to purchase a replica of the Landscapes). After Montalto's death 1623, the series went to his brother, Prince Michele Peretti Montalto and in 1631, to the prince's son, Cardinal Francesco Peretti Montalto. A 1655 inventory of the cardinal's estate reveals that the series was still complete. It is thought that the series started to be broken up from 1685 onwawrds.
The surviving tapestries of the series included depictions of other exotic animals including a Rhinoceros, a Leopard over a Pond (owned by the Sovereign Order of Malta in Palazzo Savelli Orsini, Rome) Ostriches, Stag, Dragon Eats the Eggs (now in the National Museum Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania in Vilnius) and a Leopard Biting a Lion.
There are other less detailed versions of the Landscapes with Animals by Raes, including a replica of the Lioness in the River that appeared at the Sotheby's, Zurich sale, on 10 December 1996.
Literature:
New Light on the Raes Workshop in Brussels and Rubens's Achilles Series, and in Tapestry in the Baroque. New Aspects of Production and Patronage, ed. by T. P. Campbell, E. A. H. Cleland Conference Proceedings, New York – New Haven/London 2010, pp. 20-33.
N. Forti Grazzini, "Verdures with animals", Grand Design. Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry, ed. by E. Cleland, exhibition catalogue, New York – New Haven/London 2014, pp. 338-341, fig. 243.
B. Granata, Le passioni virtuose. Collezionismo e committenze artistiche a Roma del cardinale Alessandro Peretti Montalto (1571-1623), Rome 2012,
