MEHUS, Livio

Crowned with a laurel wreath, the genius of painting is shown copying Titian’s Martyrdom of St Peter, which was originally in the Venetian Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo but later destroyed. Titian’s original appears at the left of the composition, along with the altar on which it hung. Mehus’s self-portrait occupies the centre of the canvas and looks out at the viewer.

This work is paired with the Genius of sculpture, c.1650, now at the Galleria Palatina in Florence. In that work Mehus draws the viewer’s attention to a group of classical sculptures in the middle ground while, on the right, the genius of sculpture sketches those archaeological vestiges.

The two works were painted to hang side by side, constituting a significant pair. His Genius of sculpture exalts the supremacy of Greco-Latin sculpture as a universal ideal of beauty and thus serves as an ineluctable reference for any artist. It also emphasises the importance of drawing as an essential element in an artist’s education. The reference to drawing is indicated by the manner in which the genius carefully studies the classical ruins, revealing the relation between the two paradigms championed by these works: ancient Roman sculpture and the defence of drawing.

The Museo del Prado’s work offers the opposite aesthetic option, in which the genius paints (rather than draws) a recognisable modern canvas by Titian, an artist customarily presented as a paradigm of the Venetian school that elevated colour over drawing. Thus, through these two works, Mehus offers a complete program covering two apparently antithetical aesthetic options, presenting himself as a proponent of both.

His proposal is even more ambitious for its inclusion, in both works, of a self-portrait that draws the viewer into the scene. In that sense, despite the works’ respective titles, their true protagonists are not the geniuses, nor even the defence of opposing artistic alternatives, but rather Mehus, who presents himself as a painter gifted with universal knowledge, who knows and esteems not only the art of Antiquity but also the most celebrated and legendary figures of his time, as well as their respective positions regarding drawing and colour, and their centres of production: Rome and Venice.

The young man in the foreground, thought to be Mehus himself, shows the onlooker three famous antique sculptures behind him: a bronze version of a statue of Athena, Trajan’s Column, and the bottom part of a famous statue of Hercules at rest, known as the Farnese Hercules. The small spirit crowned with a laurel wreath in bottom right corner is focused on drawing them, and thus the whole scene serves to explain that only through the ceaseless and direct study of an aspiring artist is it possible to uncover the secrets of form and matter. This subject was very popular in the 18th century, linking back to the stoic themes of the finite nature of human destiny to which the immortality of the Genius is counterposed.

The painting is one of the moralising subjects which Livio Mehus used in the 1650s, after a period in Rome spent studying the ancient world, together with Stefano della Bella, and also at the workshop of Pietro da Cortona. In his works from this period, including another canvas of the Genius of Painting, now in the Prado Museum in Madrid, or the Blind Man of Gambassi (private collection), the artist used all of his experiences from his travel and study between Venice and Rome, weaving together the taste for colour and rich tones of the Venetian painters with the airy classicism of Roman art.