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Catalogue raisonné: Description in Italian Paintings: Three Centuries of Collecting, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, 2015, cat.no. 114: 

FORMER INV. NOS.: 98 (B. 1830s); KM 1074.

PROVENANCE: Byström 1852.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: NM Cat. 1867, p. 7 (as Liberi); Sander 1872–76,
p. 112, no. 23 (as Liberi); NM Cat. 1958, p. 111 (as Liberi); Kunze 1929,
in Thieme and Becker, XXIII, p. 185; NM Cat. 1990, p. 200 (as Liberi);
Ruggeri 1996, no. 84, p. 222 (as anonymous); Aikema and
Brown 1999, p. 533.

Reclining Venus once belonged to the Byström
Collection, and in its 19th-century catalogue this
highly esteemed painting was referred to as a “Venus
à la Tiziano, by Cavalier Liberi”.¹ The latter
was the painter Pietro Liberi (1614–1687), born in
Padua, but active mainly in Venice in the second
half of the 17th century. After a series of adventurous
trips around the Mediterranean in his youth,
Liberi’s artistic career began in Rome, where he
studied the works of Michelangelo, Raphael and
Pietro da Cortona. Following an important and
artistically inspiring stay in Florence, where he
worked for the Medici family, Liberi returned to
Venice. There he was eventually made a “Cavalier
of St Mark” for his artistic merit,² hence the title
of cavalier in the Byström Collection catalogue.
Pietro Liberi’s profane works, with a taste for
sensual and erotic themes, were much appreciated
by private collectors at the time.

The Nationalmuseum canvas, depicting the naked
goddess of love, has been referred to as a possible
work of Pietro Liberi, though from a painting
of the same subject once in the Borghese Gallery
in Rome and today preserved in the Rijksmuseum
in Amsterdam, attributed to the Dutch artist
Lambert Sustris.³ The attribution to Pietro
Liberi, however, is rejected by Ugo Ruggeri, who
considers the Nationalmuseum’s Reclining Venus
not an autograph work of Liberi, but a copy by an
unknown artist of Sustris’s original.⁴

Lambert Sustris, Italianized as “Alberto
d’Olanda”, was born in Amsterdam, but left the
city at a young age and went to Italy. There he
was mainly active in Veneto, where he entered
the circle of Titian.⁵ The Reclining Venus in the
Rijksmuseum is an early work by Sustris, and the
model for it is clearly the famous Venus of Urbino
by Titian at the Uffizi Gallery, though represented
in a more northern manner.⁶ Compared with
Titian’s work, in Sustris’s personal interpretation,
as in the Nationalmuseum copy, Venus is depicted
on a bed strewn with roses, in a slightly more
raised reclining position. The background shows
a lady playing a spinet in addition to the maids
at the chest, and by the open loggia a couple are
talking confidentially while admiring the red evening
sky. The roses, the couple by the loggia and
the harmony that comes from music are all symbols
of conjugal love expressed in the painting.⁷

Other versions of the original at the Rijksmuseum
are known today, such as the canvas preserved
in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, although
that painting is considered a 19th-century copy
commissioned to replace the original by Lambert
Sustris which left the gallery during that period.⁸
se

1 RA, E I a: 280 Finansdep. Konseljakt, ärende nr. II,
1852-05-26, Katalog öfver framlidne Professor J. N.
Byströms Tafvel-Samling, no. 98 “Venus à la Tiziano af
Cavaliere Liberi, 1500 Rdr Banco”.
2 “Liberi, Pietro”, in La pittura in Italia. Il Seicento, II, Milan,
1988, p. 786; Ruggeri 1996, pp. 3–52.
3 Lambert Sustris, attributed to, Reclining Venus, oil on
canvas, 116 x 186, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. no. A 3479.
4 Ruggeri 1996, no. 84, p. 222.
5 Ballarin 1962, pp. 61– 81.
6 Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538, oil on canvas, 119 x 165, Uffizi
Gallery, Florence, inv. no. 1437.
7 Aikema and Brown 1999, p. 533.
8 Wethey 1975, p. 204. 19th century, Reclining Venus, oil on
canvas, 118 x 180 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome, inv. no. 50.
Apart from the two copies in the Nationalmuseum and the
Galleria Borghese, other versions of Sustris’s original are a
canvas published in The Connoisseur (XXXIV, no. 134,
1912, p. 112), another that was once in Amsterdam (De Zon
sale, 9 April 1963), and a third, previously in the Campi
Collection in Florence. One copy (possibly a fourth) was
sold at Christie’s Amsterdam, European Noble and Private
Collections, 24–25 June 2008 (sale cat. 2008), no. 657, p. 264,
After Lambert Sustris, Reclining Venus in an Interior, oil on
canvas, 117.2 x 181.8. [End]

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