Skip to Main Content
Home>Collection>Procris and the Unicorn

Provenance

Commissioned c. 1522 by Gerolamo Rabia for either the Casa Rabia, Milan, or his country house, La Pelucca, near Monza.[1] Michele Cavaleri, Milan; sold 1873 to Enrico (Henri) Cernuschi [1821-1896], Paris and Menton, until at least 1895.[2] (Charles Sedelmeyer, Paris), by 1897.[3] Rodolphe Kann [d. 1905], Paris, by 1900;[4] his estate; sold 1907 to (Duveen Brothers, Inc., London, New York, and Paris); sold 1942 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[5] gift 1943 to NGA.

[1] See the discussion in Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings, 2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1979: 1:285-288. If the frescoes were in the Casa Rabia, on the Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan, the house passed out of the family about 1530, but the paintings remained in place since they were not removed until about 1800. Among the subsequent owners of the house were the Palletta and Silva families.

[2] The ownership of the frescoes by Cavaleri and Cernuschi, as well as other information about the provenance is discussed in detail by Luca Beltrami, Luini, materiale de studio, Milan, 1911: 188-198. Cavaleri was a Milanese lawyer who began collecting around 1845 and from 1870 on opened to the public what by then had come to be called the Cavaleri Museum. The owner hoped that the collection would be purchased by the city of Milan, but when negotiations fell through, he sold the entire collection to Cernuschi on 13 April 1873 (see Alessandra Mottola Molfino, "Collezionismo e mercato artistico a Milano," in Zenale e Leonardo. Tradizione e rinnovamento della pittura lombarda, Milan, 1982: 247-248). Cernuschi was a Milanese emigrant to France, and as he otherwise collected mainly objects of Asian Art (see Caroline Gyss-Vermande, "Cernuschi, Henri," in Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., New York, 1996: 6:345), it is likely he obtained his Italian paintings from the Cavaleri collection.

[3] Charles Sedelmeyer, [catalogue], Paris, 1897: nos. 52-60.

[4] Gemälde-Sammlung des Herrn Rudolf Kann in Paris. 100 Photogravuren mit Text von Wilhelm Bode, Vienna, 1900.

[5] Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV-XVI Century, London, 1968: 141-142. See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/1734.

Exhibition History

1946
Recent Additions to the Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1946, no. 728.

Bibliography

1940
Frankfurter, Alfred M. "Luini Frescos That Bring the Renaissance to Life." Art News34, no. 12 (21 December 1940):8.
1945
Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1945 (reprinted 1947, 1949): 112, repro.
1959
Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 184, repro.
1965
Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 80.
1968
Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Central Italian and North Italian Schools. 3 vols. London, 1968: 1:235.
1968
National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 70, repro.
1968
Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV-XVI Century. London, 1968: 141-142, fig. 347.
1975
European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 206, repro.
1979
Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1979: 1:285-288; 2:pl. 204.
1984
Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 195, no. 231, color repro.
1985
European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 239, repro.
2019
Quattrini, Cristina. Bernardino Luini: Catalogo generale delle opere. Turin, 2019: 22, 39, 51, 38-41, 149-169, 228, 230, 436, cat. 20.

Related Content

  • Sort by:
  • Results layout:
Show  results per page
The image compare list is empty.