Gian Antonio Pellegrini (Venice, 1675-1741) The Clemency of Scipio Oil on canvas, 105 x 130 cm SOLD This painting depicts an episode in the life of Scipio the African, mentioned for the first time in Livius (26,50), reported in Polibius (10, 17, 19) and put into lyrics by Petrarch (Africa, 4, 375-388): it is about how, once the Spanish city New Carthage was conquered, a young woman was taken before the Roman leader as she was supposed to be part of the winner’s loot. Notwithstanding this right of acquisition, when he learned the lady had already been betrothed, Scipio summoned the man, named Allucius, and he released her, giving him also the ransom her relatives had managed to scrape together in the hopes to free her. This subject had a great fortune in Venetian painting between the 17th and 18th centuries. The most clear compositional and thematic prototype, many drew from, can be traced to two inventions Sebastiano Ricci conceived, one in Palazzo Maruccelli-Fenzi in Florence and, especially, the other in the Galleria Nazionale in Parma… (See GIAMBLANCO GALLERY OLD MASTER PAINTINGS – Italian Painting from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Century, Allemandi, 2014) [ANNALISA SCARPA] Measurements H x W x D Height cm.: 105 Width cm.: 130