Portrait of La Duchessa Mancini Colonna (1646-1699)

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Having been bequeathed to the museum as the work of Pierre Mignard (1612-1695), the present painting was attributed by Schmidt-Degener to the Aix-en-Provence portrait painter, Laurent Fauchier (1643-1672),⁸ by whom no signed works were known, but to whom a group of attributed portraits was then being exhibited in the ground-breaking exhibition at the Paris Orangerie Les Peintres de la Réalité en France (1934-35). One of these was in fact signed by Jacob Ferdinand Voet,⁹ and the exhibition’s organiser, Charles Sterling, was by February 1935 conceding the possibility that the whole Fauchier group was actually by Voet,¹⁰ to which last artist Bautier attributed the Rijksmuseum portrait four years later.¹¹ Subsequently it has been attributed to Voet by the museum; indeed Bautier’s proposal has been generally accepted¹² and most notably by Petrucci in his monograph on the artist of 2005.¹³

Although Petrucci argues against studio participation in Voet’s production,¹⁴ such might be admitted in the present portrait as the costume, where there is a small pentiment, seems far less assured in handling than the face, chest and hair, while the positioning of the sitter’s right arm seems clumsy (as was often the case in his bust-length female portraits). And in fact another sitter was depicted wearing the same costume;¹⁵ Petrucci places the museum portrait as the earlier of the two.

Bautier connected the physiognomy in the Rijksmuseum portrait with those of the nieces of Cardinal Mazarin (1602-1661) who had all been introduced to the French court by the 1650s.¹⁶ He thought the sitter was similar to that in the portrait at Berlin, which he believed was to be identified as Maria (1640-1715), but who is now thought to be the younger sister Ortensia (1646-1699).¹⁷ But Wilhelm writing in 1966 advanced as a candidate the youngest Mancini sibling Maria Anna (1649-1714), who became the Duchesse de Bouillon¹⁸ (a title incorrectly given to Maria Mancini in the 1961 and 1976 museum catalogues). For Petrucci the Amsterdam painting is ‘one of the few portraits by Voet in which in fact one recognizes the physiognomy of the wife of the constable’ (for which title, see below), that is Maria Mancini.¹⁹

Maria was famous as the young King Louis XIV’s first love and then notorious for having left her husband, the great Italian aristocrat Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna (1637-1689), Duke of Tagliacozzo, Prince of Paliano, Gran Connestabile of the Kingdom of Naples (from 1659) and Castiglione, and later Viceroy of Aragon, whom she had married in 1661 to become the cynosure of Rome. But as she described in her memoirs of 1678, having had two miscarriages and given birth to three sons all in four years, she denied her husband conjugal rights and then left him and Rome in 1672.²⁰ She departed with her sister Ortensia, who had already left her mentally disturbed husband and abandoned Paris for Rome in 1668, having briefly returned to effect a reconciliation in 1670/71.²¹ Until her husband’s death, Maria’s erratic career spent on the road or confined in nunneries was the concern of the Vatican and the courts of Paris, Madrid, Brussels and Turin.

Key to the identification of the sitter is Voet’s double portrait (British Royal Collection Trust), inspired by Caravaggio’s Fortune Teller, in which Ortensia’s fortune is told.²² She is identified by an old inscription, and it is assumed with justification that Maria is depicted as the fortune teller. The painting would most likely have been painted during one of Ortensia’s two brief sojourns in Rome circa 1670. Another significant point of comparison is the full-length portrait of Maria in fancy costume dressed as Armida in the Colonna collection where the face is more leanly rendered.²³ The early provenances of this and the Royal Collection Trust picture are not known and the identification of the personage as Maria is not documented; but taken together such an assumption seems justified. The sitter in the museum portrait seems marginally younger than the fortune teller and perhaps also than when portrayed in the guise of Armida; and perhaps – as far as can be made out in the reproduction – less aged than in the inscribed portrait, which formed part of the Chigi ‘galleria delle belle’ dated by Petrucci to the winter/spring of 1671/72.²⁴ A date circa 1670 or a little later would agree with the unostentatious costume – later deemed suitable for a socially less eminent sitter (see above) – which is similar to that worn by Maria Camilla Pallavicini Rospigliosi,²⁵ described by Petrucci referring to Giorgetti as ‘not certainly official … with a rose coloured informal dress which reveals an audacious neckline following a fashion which became popular from 1672’.²⁶

The Duchess described herself thus: ‘I have an oval face… the forehead is high … one sees above two black eyebrows … they are thick … the eyes are large … dark … brilliant and full of fire … The nose is neither large or small … If the mouth is less large it has all the delights one could wish for … The hair is of a black colour that it neither harsh or dark … The locks are fine, soft, long and very thick …’.²⁷

The sitter went on to describe her brilliant, ardent and lively personality; her fine judgement, she stated, kept distractions under control, but, she confessed, it would be happy if it could better master ‘certain passions which are a bit too headstrong, blind and violent when they are met with resistance…’.²⁸ This aspect of her personality is not hinted at in the present portrait, whose attractive demeanour is a characteristic of Voet’s other glamorous portraits of aristocratic women.

Petrucci accorded the museum portrait an exceptional status. But the sitter looks a good deal younger than a mother of three of about thirty years old (a flattering pretence which might be described as Voet’s speciality). The only portrait of the Duchess in the Colonna inventories was larger and showed her holding a dog.²⁹ But it can be imagined that the present work was not executed ad vivum, but that the portrayal of the sitter was glamorized by Voet for acquisition in the market, and thus could even have been executed after she had left Rome in 1672.

Petrucci lists what he considers to be three autograph versions or replicas and three likely copies of the portrait.³⁰

Gregory Martin, 2022