Fan - The Rape of the Sabin Women

The vividly coloured leaf has a chinoiserie frame patterned in gold on a blue and red base. In three symmetrically positioned groups Roman soldiers and Sabine women struggle with each other. In the background on the left there is a building with a tympanum, in the centre an obelisk, and on the right Romulus giving the signal for the attack (Livy I, 9). With regard to composition, the depiction is based on a Pietro da Cortona painting (Pinacoteca Capitolana, Rome), and its direct model can—in all probability—be regarded as a copper engraving (Le Bl. 83 fig- 10/1.) by Pietro Aquila (|1692). The clumsy, awkwardly painted figures on the fan follow the original hardly at all, but their arrangement, as well as other collateral elements—details on buildings and military insignia —, follow it relatively faithfully. The lusty, well-built pro¬tagonists in the Corton picture become corpulent and stocky on the fan. The three groups—following the f ormat of the fan's leaf—are at a distance from one another, and are supplemented by a number of figures at the two edges. On the verso, among trees in the foreground, couple sit opposite each other in the background is a manor house, with a town at the top of a hill rising above it. The bottom sections of the distinctive, minutely worked sticks form circular, as well as trefoil and quatrefoil, apertures. In the top third, in three irregularly shaped, painted cartouches, one can see a vase of flowers and putti feeding lambs. On the mother-of-pearl inlay between the cartouches there are birds and caryatids(P). On the guard-sticks, above a caryatid growing out the painted tendrils, there is a figure playing the flute among the mother-of-pearl tendrils at the very top there is a mermaid. A fan with similarly embellished sticks made using an identical technique is published by Rosenberg 1891, VI, PI. 54 above right and by Kammerl 1989, No. 21 the latter describes it as English work.