Marco LIBERI (Padua c. 1640 – after 1687 Venice)

Portrait of a Young Woman as Flora

Oil on canvas (re-stretched), enlarged by a 4 cm strip at the top, 104 x 78.8 cm

Inventory label ‘31’ on the stretcher, a second label reading ‘DANGLETERRE, 40 and 42 Rue de Seine’           

PROVENANCE

-       Private collection in northern France until 2024.

            Marco Liberi, an Italian painter of the Baroque period, was born around 1644 and is known to have been alive after 1687, the year his father Pietro died. The son and pupil of Pietro Liberi – who was himself born in Padua and trained in the workshop of Alessandro Varotari, known as Il Padovanino – Marco began his training in his father’s workshop in 1665, the year in which they both painted the fresco "The Glory of Saint Anthony" in the sacristy of Padua Basilica. He subsequently continued in his father’s style and is regarded as a successor to the family tradition, though with his own distinctive traits—lively diagonal compositions and figures placed close to the edge of the frame. Marco transformed his father’s Baroque grandeur into more graceful forms. This distinctive feature of Marco Liberi’s style had already been noted and appreciated by the 18th-century critic Anton Maria Zanetti, who regarded him as a precursor to the classicist pictorial language of Antonio Balestra (see E. Lucchese, *Nel segno della grazia. Antonio Balestra, master of Anton Maria Zanetti di Girolamo and in Giambattista Tiepolo’s ‘Scuola del Nudo’, in: "Valori Tattili", 9, 2017, p. 156).

He worked mainly in Venice and Padua and specialised in ‘cabinet paintings’ — small canvases depicting allegorical, mythological or historical subjects — intended for private collectors. His body of work also includes copies of Pietro’s works. 

            Stylistically, our previously unpublished work can be compared to an Allegory of Truth, Justice and Innocence (Marco LIBERI, oil on canvas, 149.2 × 200.3 cm, Sotheby’s New York, 31 January 2019, lot no. 162) (fig. 1) and to a Venus with Cupid and Two Maids (Marco LIBERI, oil on canvas, 73.5 × 90 cm, Dorotheum, Vienna, 6 October 2009, lot no. 27) (fig. 2). Note the striking resemblance between the face of our Flora and those in the two aforementioned paintings.