Allegory of Arts and Commerce Louis Gabriel Blanchet (1705 - 1772 )

Pair of paintings depicting the Allegory of the Arts and the Allegory of Commerce in oil on canvas, 68 x 92 cm without frame and 88 x 112 cm with wonderful frame by the painter Louis Gabriel Blanchet ( Paris 1705 - Rome 1772 ), dating from around 1750 - 1760.

These two fine canvases in an excellent state of preservation are attributed to Louis-Gabriel Blanchet, who was known above all as one of the most talented Roman portrait painters of his time. In fact, his best known - and most investigated - production is precisely that related to this pictorial genre, although, as the sources inform us - not that what has come down to us - the Frenchman was a truly eclectic artist who treated the most varied subjects; only altarpieces are currently missing from his curriculum vitae.

More specifically: it is plausible that the unpublished works, as the type of frame - original and perfectly preserved - the format and the type of composition lead us to think, where large empty spaces occupied by the soft muffled clouds, silhouetted against a clear sky, give a certain spatial depth that is combined with a purely decorative vein, typical of that type of destination; I would not be surprised, moreover, if they had been conceived as the crowning of a mirror, a rare but not improbable occurrence, especially in the Capitoline context.

They stand out for their cultured and anything but usual iconography: in the first, the protagonist is Minerva, clearly recognisable by the attributes of her helmet, spear and shield with the face of a medusa: the goddess has been associated with wisdom since antiquity, as she sprang from the head of Zeus, her father, so in the canvas sub judice, the intention is to emphasise how knowledge, understood as intellectual and speculative activity, guides practice, the realisation of the idea in the earthly world.

It is no coincidence that at her feet we do not find female allegories, but cherubs that we can identify as genii, or tutelary deities of the various arts or branches of knowledge, perhaps to be associated with the goddess herself as her direct emanations: Starting from the left, we find the attributes of painting and sculpture - a palette with a paintbrush, a head of classical inspiration - at the feet of the child intent on drawing geometric solids on a sheet of paper, which therefore allow us to call him a genius of geometry; not coincidentally, he has a globe at his side and another child with a flute and score, the genius of music.

It therefore seems that wisdom, understood as an intellectual tension towards knowledge, derives from a connecting role between the various arts linked precisely to geometry, according to a conception of clear Greek inspiration, which sees it as the foundation of our understanding of the world, regulated by quantifiable relations and correspondences. Indeed, Plato not only places it at the basis of philosophical reasoning, but above mathematics, in that it is the contemplation of eternal, immutable forms that numbers then attempt to translate into intelligible quantities.

I believe that this interpretation is somewhat corroborated by Minerva's gesture, which points to a point outside the pictorial space, and puts the goddess in relation to Mercury, the protagonist of the painting en pendant: clearly recognisable by the attributes of the winged helmet and the caduceus, a character in mythology that has always been related to astuteness and the protector of commerce.

Here, then, is a globe which, by order of the god, some genii are translating onto a map, in order to guide men in their travels, from which spring the riches promised by the overturned cornucopia, filled with gold and silver coins. Thus in our paintings, the arts are at the service of reason, which guides the development of man's intellectual and manual abilities, increasing his knowledge of the world as well as his material as well as spiritual well-being.

The paintings and works of art published here are my exclusive property and therefore are always available to be viewed, by appointment, in my exhibition sites located in Sanremo and Brescia.

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Mr. Riccardo Moneghini
Art Historian