A. Mazzacchera – Abstract

The renovation of the Church of Santa Caterina in via Giulia in Roma, dedicated to the people of Siena, promoted by Cardinal Scipione Borghese over the decade from 1766-1767 with the aim of consolidating links between the Borghese family and Siena, was the first of a prestigious series of operations that involved the princely Palazzo Borghese in Campo Marzio (1767-1775). A fairly stable group of artists, most of them young painters, thus moved around the many sites. Among them was Gaetano Lapis (1706-1773) who, having completed the main altarpiece for the Church of Santa Caterina, as well as two large ovals for the presbytery, carried out his final masterpiece in 1771-72, with the Birth of Venus at Palazzo Borghese: a work that was able to leave “a lasting mark on the evolution of Roman painting in the final quarter of the 1700s". Lapis ended his artistic journey with a mythological subject, reinvigorating his classical vision without ever crossing the threshold of neoclassicism to which other painters in that group associated with the Borghese patrons aspired. While it can be said that Lapis broadly concentrated on sacred and ecclesiastical subjects, he nonetheless used secular stories as a means of expression at the beginning and end of his career.

Indeed in 1732-1733 he executed the painting depicting The Battle at the Bridge of Valiano (154 x 213 cm.) for a gift by the Tondi family of Gubbio to the city of Siena, where it is still conserved in the Museo Civico in Palazzo Pubblico. The painting, which escaped the notice of Lapis’s first biographer, was “applauded and praised” in Rome, and in Siena it was praised by the many people who went to admire it. This undertaking, meticulously documented, gives further force to the appreciative description that the biographer De' Rossi gave in 1787 to the series of five large canvasses (172 x 248 cm. each) with stories from Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (traditionally regarded as his first works in Roma), of which three interesting studies and a small-scale replica have recently re-emerged. Lapis’s markedly scenic and theatrical approach is apparent in the two themes of the “triumph of death” and the “triumph of love”.

The young Gaetano, at the time of executing these paintings, was working with Sebastiano Conca, the father of eighteenth-century Roman painting, whose atelier from 1725 was probably the most important in Rome. The suggestion that Lapis began his career under the protection of the Berardi family of Cagli is strengthened by the significant presence of the architect Anton Francesco Berardi, who was working on various building projects together with Carlo Murena, whose name by 1739 was linked with that of Luigi Vanvitelli. And then it would be no coincidence that in the churches designed by Anton Francesco Berardi there are always works by Lapis, sometimes with those of Conca, and that in Gubbio, the second place of residence of the Berardi family, the name Lapis is, for example, documented before that of his master Sebastiano.