17th century, Berenice's Hair

17th century, Genoese school

Berenice's Hair

Oil on canvas, 87 x 125 cm

With frame, 112 x 147 cm

The painting presents an absolutely rare and little-known iconographic theme, that of Berenice's Hair, of mythological origin. The protagonist of this painting is Berenice Evergete, Cyrenaic queen and wife of Ptolemy III, Pharaoh of Egypt: the woman, of extraordinary beauty, had very long and shiny hair, a source of admiration and envy for all the women of the kingdom. Shortly after the wedding, Ptolemy III left for a military campaign in Syria, with a very uncertain outcome, and Berenice, worried about her husband's safety, made a solemn vow to the goddess Aphrodite, offering her her splendid hair if she would prove benevolent and bring her beloved back safe and victorious over his enemies. Ptolemy returned triumphant from the military campaign and Berenice, keeping her promise, once she received news of the Pharaoh's military success from a messenger, wrapped her beautiful hair in a long braid that she cut and brought as a gift to the temple dedicated to Aphrodite. The following day, however, there was no trace of the precious offering. There was a great outcry and someone called into question the priest of the temple dedicated to the Egyptian god Serapis accusing him of having removed the braid, scandalized by the outrage that the queen would have done to the local gods by offering her vow to a Greek divinity. Berenice despaired and her husband, returning from the front, moved by anger and outrage, had all the gates of the city closed and had it searched in vain. The frantic search for the queen's precious offering was calmed by the words of Conon of Sarno, a great sage, mathematician, astrologer and court astronomer, known for his friendship with Archimedes of Syracuse. Conon, raising his fingers to the sky, pointed to three stars and pointed out that there was nothing to worry about, since the gods had so appreciated the offering that they had raised the braid to the sky and fixed it in the firmament. Thus it was that from that day on, those three stars that form a small V near the center of the tail of the chariot of the Great Bear, thanks to Conon, took the name of Coma (or Coma) of Berenices.

It was Callimachus - the most famous of the Alexandrian poets, a man of great erudition and culture who lived from 315 to 240 BC - who first told this story in a poem of which, unfortunately, only a few fragments have reached us, only two portions of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus for a total of 40 verses. Fortunately, the text was masterfully translated into Latin by Gaius Valerius Catullus (85-54 BC) who, by including it among his works, allowed the myth to be spread, known to this day: just think of Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827) who wrote a version in vernacular Italian in 1803.

Berenice (Cyrene, 25 December 267 BC – 221 BC) was a very important female figure in the Hellenic world. She was queen consort of Cyrene from 250 to 249 BC and of Egypt from 246 to 222 BC and administered the two lands while Ptolemy III was engaged in the third Syrian war, the so-called "Laodicean war". In 222 BC Ptolemy III died and, with the ascension to the throne of Ptolemy IV Philopator, Berenice was assassinated along with other members of the royal family, suspected of a conspiracy against the newly elected pharaoh. After their death, Berenice and her beloved husband Ptolemy were deified and included in the dynastic cult with the name of Dei Evergeti.

In this painting, the queen, having laid down her crown, is depicted in the act of gathering, with the help of a servant, her thick hair into a braid: after receiving the message of Ptolemy's victory in battle from the young messenger represented on the left of the composition, the queen is in fact ready to respect the vow and donate her hair to the powerful goddess Aphrodite.

The representation of queens and heroines from myth and ancient history is common in Northern Italian painting of the seventeenth century. The fashion of Baroque painting had spread the faces of women from history, original images of virtue and sensuality that were sometimes gathered in private rooms, a kind of female court to be watched and remembered in the example: Dido, Cleopatra, Judith and Lucretia were undoubtedly the most represented. Although less fortunate on an iconographic level, the figure of Berenice also recurs in some paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including that of Padovanino (1588-1649), now in a private collection (exhibited on the occasion of the recent exhibition Le trecce di Faustina. Acconciature, donne e potere nel Rinascimento, held in Vicenza at the Gallerie d'Italia in 2023), in which the queen consort of the Pharaoh is presented in the act of donating her thick braid to the priest of the temple of Aphrodite, that of Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757) of the Detroit Institute of Art, in which the woman is depicted in the act of cutting her hair, and that of Lorenzo Pécheux (1729-1821) of the Galleria Sabauda in Turin. The particular iconographic scheme of this painting, which includes the characters of the servant and the messenger with the scroll, as well as objects such as the comb and the crown, appears to be slavishly repeated in La chioma di Berenice by the pupil of the Cavalier d'Arpino active in the Veneto region Francesco Ruschi (1610-1661): the work, dated around the 40s and today in Palazzo San Bonifacio in Padua, is very probably contemporary with this painting.

The theme of Berenice's braid enjoys relative popularity in the Genoese area, as demonstrated by the beautiful painting in the El Paso museum in Texas. Both the historical-mythological theme and the atmosphere of the painting suggest that it was executed in the Ligurian area: in fact, there are many analogies with the works of the two major exponents of the Genoese Baroque, Domenico Piola (1627-1703) and Domenico Fiasella (1589-1669), to whom the artist seems to look with regard to the colours, the brush strokes and the physiognomies of the faces.

The object is in good condition