Rhea Silvia

Rhea Silvia, Caecilia Metella and Aemilia the Vestal Virgin form a single group in terms of format, subject matter and collecting history. The three women were all major figures in ancient Rome in the days of the Republic, the paintings depicting episodes that capture the tragedy of each woman’s fate.

According to both Livy and Quintus Ennius, Rhea Silvia was the daughter of Numitor, the Latin King of Alba Longa. She was forced to embrace chastity and to become a recluse in the Temple of Vesta by her uncle Amulius, after he usurped her father’s throne, in order to prevent her from giving birth to a potential rival to the throne. Rhea Silvia, however, was seduced by Mars and gave birth to Romulus and Remus, who grew up to avenge their grandfather and their mother by slaying Numitor. Giani has chosen to depict an episode of female solidarity reflecting the somewhat less bloodthirsty version of the story as told by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his Roman Antiquities: Princess Anto (on the left) helps her cousin Rhea Silvia, heavy with child (on the right), in prison.

The scene takes place in a sombre interior whose complexity lies in the rich and mysterious decorations such as torches, sculptures or wall paintings, and inscriptions on the walls and on an altar. Thus the allusion embodied by the setting is at once to the temple and to the prison to which the story of the Vestal Virgin refers.

Rhea Silvia was also one of the episodes that Giani portrayed in Palazzo Naldi in Faenza in 1802, as part of a series of scenes on the ceiling in the hall recounting the origin of Rome, and in two other small pictures in a private collection in the same vein: Mars and Rhea Silvia, and Rhea Silvia Buried Alive.

Giani’s highly individual style with its typically rapid brushwork may point to the direct influence of “compendiary painting”, a sketchy style popular in ancient Rome, which the artist had studied at first hand in the decorations of the period.

Writing in 1999, Anna Ottani Cavina proposed an early date some time in the final decade of the 18th century for the small group of pictures, but we can actually push the group forward to the following decade on stylistic grounds and in view of its far looser brushwork. The sketchy style of the small-format painting echoes the shorthand approach, the rapid technique also found in the scenes on the ceiling, which Giani invariably depicted with economical yet highly effective brushwork.